Youtube comments of josh fritz (@joshfritz5345).
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Yes, the first two movies were better. That being said, this movie is much better than I expected it to be. Yes, it runs on nostalgia, and yes, sometimes characters do stupid things to drive the plot. That being said, it's more good than bad, and I'm willing to overlook the negative parts of it because they got a lot of things right, and the film was overall enjoyable. It relies on a few too many of the same tropes as the first two in the series, but it's just different enough to be its own movie. For example, the scene where the characters have to navigate acid blood in zero G was very creative. As a bonus, there is no hint of modern politics in this movie arguably with the exception of the casting. Still, the actors were alright overall, and I feel comfortable calling this the third best Alien movie to date. I'd recommend it for Aliens fans, or for anyone who enjoys horror movies.
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This video doesn't mention that some of the founding components of socialism are based on flawed premises. For example, the labor theory of value is flatly wrong. The labor theory of value claims that the value of an item is based on how much labor was put into making it. By this standard, a bowl of rice made with many hours of labor through manual farming is much more valuable than a bowl of rice from a factory farm using tractors which produces fifty times as much rice for the same amount of human labor. In reality, both bowls of rice are identical and have identical value. Value is subjective, and few care where the rice came from, only it's quality and price.
For someone who believes in the labor theory of value, some terrible practices may seem like good ideas. For example, price controls and minimum wage laws make sense only if you believe that prices can be set, or that an item's value should be tied directly to the labor going into it, and disregard the consequences of said assumptions. Minimum wage effectively bans low-skill labor, making it very difficult for people with little job experience to find a job. Price controls force down prices below the actual value of the item, forcing the businesses to operate at a loss, and worse, leading to a shortage of the commodity since people will buy it all up since the prices cannot rise in response to scarcity. Additionally, if producing this commodity is no longer profitable since the businesses is being forced to sell at a loss, less if any of these goods will be produced.
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Two things on tariffs that you didn't directly address that can still make them desirable sometimes.
1. They are a type of protectionism. Yes, tariffs are a tax, and those costs do usually make their way to the consumer in part. However, they are primarily designed to favor domestic industry over foreign industry. By making foreign goods more expensive, a country can make it more viable to produce those goods locally even if the locals demand a higher wage. The result is also an increase in the cost of goods, but some would consider the additional jobs created a net positive. Protectionism isn't very libertarian, but it is seen as desirable to some people.
2. Tariffs as a negotiation tool. This is very relevant to the current situation in the US. A certain president is using tariffs as a means to strongarm other countries to lower their tariffs on his own country, or to address a trade deficit. In the short term, imported goods get more expensive, but the one imposing the tariffs is gambling that they can use them to get more favorable trading terms to export their own goods, spurring local economic growth.
Tariffs aren't creating any new resources, they're a tool to try and get the country implementing them a larger part of the pie for themselves. Even if you're honest about that, some people would still consider that a goal worth pursuing.
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@HobanProduction No, fascism is a variation of socialism. Communism, fascism, corporatism, all are derivatives of socialism. Mussolini, the founder of fascism as we know it, actually started out as a Marxist. What set apart fascism from other forms of socialism is that it "privatized" parts of the economy, allowing a handful of government selected actors to have monopoly over these industries.
In fascist italy, these "private" entities were the trade unions, in modern America, these would be the corporations. In either case, the "private" entities are effectively arms of the state, they are distinct entities in name only. Corporations wield just as much government power as an official branch of government, and politicians hold similar power over corporate actions as do CEOs.
Fascism is, like all other socialist systems, very much an economic system. The likely reason you believe this not to be the case is because you've always heard "fascism" used in the modern, coequal sense, a meaningless smear against any vaguely conservative ideology. This is a blatant misuse of the term. It is no more accurate to call Trump a fascist than it is to call Putin a Nazi. You can dislike either or both men, but they have no relation to the ideologies of midcentury socialists.
The modern west is very, very far left in the grand scheme of things. This has brought a mix of both good and bad things. It's a long list and I'm not going to get into it now, but the modern neo-liberal is in some respects to the left of Stalin. This is not a value judgement, this is a statement of fact. Sexual liberation is an example of this. Even the modern conservative is more in favor of women's rights and gay rights than the average Marxist of the 1930s.
If you want a modern example of a genuinely far right government, look at the Taliban who currently run Afganistan. Republicans are nowhere near as conservative or as authoritarian as them. If you broaden your scopes either globally (past Europe and North America) or through time, the entire western world of politics takes place within a neo-liberal framework that is rather far left and moderately authoritarian.
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He certainly took it too far, but there isn't nothing to it. Personality traits of a person, as well as intelligence, are genetically inheritable to a degree. The degree to which a give trait is heritable varies, but overall, a person's personality is about half inherited, and half learned. Ironically, Lovecraft himself is an example of him inheriting his mother's mental conditions. Still, culture is at least as important as genetics. Someone born with parents from a different continent getting proper nutrition, education and growing up in a host culture will be far better integrated with this culture than someone born with common genetics to the local people but a different cultural upbringing. Successful immigration programs prioritize cultural assimilation, and those immigrants usually become a welcome, contributing part of the local community within a generation or two.
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@jinxterpinxter Not in a court of law. I recall one instance off of the top of my head where a black gun owner shot three cops during a no-knock raid, and all charges against him were dropped. Best part is, they raided the wrong house by accident.
Now, it'd have been better if no one was shot, but frankly, no cop should ever take part in a no-knock raid. It is a violation of multiple fundamental rights. If a few cops need to get shot for the rest of them to get the message that the people will not stand for the tyranny of these Democrat run cities, so be it. If they can't respect the rights of the citizens they are supposed to protect, maybe they deserve to get shot.
Every citizen has a right to be armed, and it is more important than ever for black, brown, white and asian people alike to arm themselves. We all should be capable of defending ourselves, our families and our property from criminals, even if those criminals have badges.
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@WmPryor1 It sounds like you got most of your information from memoirs and TV programs. There's nothing wrong with that, but keep in mind that these sources aren't always 100% reliable, and should be supplemented by other sources.
When the M4 Sherman was introduced, it was resistant to the 50mm high velocity and 75mm low velocity guns used by the German PzIII and PzIV respectively. It was also all but immune to the towed Pak 36 and Pak 38 AT guns, and resistant to the 75mm Pak 97/38, the stopgap AT solution until the infamous Pak 40 was able to be mass produced. In terms of sheer thickness, the Sherman was about equal to the late model PzIV but with a better angled frontal plate giving it slightly better protection overall.
Moving away from armor thickness for now, the M4 wasn't especially prone to fuel fires simply due to being gasoline powered. Many nations, including Germany, used gasoline powered tanks for most of the war. What did plague the M4 were ammunition fires in the early models. It earned a bad reputation for ammunition fires, but it actually wasn't any more prone to these than any other tank, but its reputation am among troops took a worse hit since it was seen as the premier tank at the time, and it shared this same flaw with other, less reputable tanks.
You could argue that badly placed ammunition made the M4 a bit more vulnerable, but in reality, all tanks were at risk of ammunition fires at this point in time since wet ammo racks weren't a widespread feature. The M4 was one of the first mass produced vehicles to receive them actually.
No, the M4 was not as well armored as a Tiger or Panther, but it was quite probably the best armored medium tank at the time of its introduction, and unlike the European powers at the time, the USA had strict weight and size limitations when designing the M4 to allow it to be shipped overseas en mass. It was the best tank for America at the time. It wasn't a rolling fortress, but a nigh inpeneratable heavy tank that was twice the weight, twice the cost and half as reliable would inarguably have been less suitable for the needs of the US military at the time.
As to your point about American crews covering their tanks in improvised armor, yes, this happened, but it wasn't unique to American forces. German tankers made fairly regular use of improvised armor, the side skirt armor you see on many PzIV and StuG models was designed in response to widespread use of AT rifles by the Russians, and prior to its deployment, German tankers would use makeshift armor in much the same manner as American tankers did. There are photos of German Panzers covered in elaborate welded on armor boxes that are clearly makeshift applique armor, but these photos are rarer since many German records were destroyed when they lost the war, while allied records of similar unofficial modifications remain intact.
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@DavidBoston464 Technically, I don't need actual policy, for Trump, I can judge based on the 4 years we had of him, something we can't do with most presidents. The 4 years we had of Trump as president were undeniably better than our 4 years of Biden/ Harris. The economy was better, we were at relative peace, and the president wasn't threatening his own populace with fighter jets and nuclear bombs. Under Biden... well... yeah.
I agree with you that Harris has few actual stated policies. The only one I recall is "no tax on tips" which is a proposal she "borrowed" from Trump. Trump has outright stated that he intends to strengthen the American energy sector, increase microchip production to reduce reliance on foreign imports, to re-negotiate bad trade deals, drill oil domestically, and overall do lots of stuff that would lead to a prosperous working/ middle class. I actually disagree with him on a couple of things such as excessive tarrifs (which would increase the cost of import goods), but I have to admit that it's perfectly in line with his policy of strengthening American industry.
As far as non-economy related policy stuff, Trump has made his position on many social issues clear. He has no intention of banning abortion, and he has stated his approval of IVF, even claiming that he'd sponsor programs for it, albeit this may have been a stunt to disprove claims that he opposed it. He claimed that he would ban men from competing in women's sports. I agree with the sentiment, but I believe a more "soft touch" solution is better, something like making federal funding for school sports contingent on having separate sports leagues for male and female students. He's also vaguely declared himself to be pro-gun, although his actual track record on this is spotty. Still better than Kamala who has repeatedly stated that she intends to disarm US citizens.
There's a ton of stuff I could go over, but I hope this answers your questions.
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there's a variety of reasons... in my case:
1. we were financially dependent on each other
2. i didn't want to feel like i had wasted part of my life by undoing a relationship i had worked so hard for
3. i didn't want to disappoint or hurt them... it might not make sense from the outside, but sometimes in an unhealthy relationship, the submissive partner can feel like they owe their dominant partner a debt they can never repay
4. i was afraid of what might happen to me if i tried to leave... not so much physical violence, but more so a lack of other options... i had nowhere else to stay at the time
5. they had control over when and how i was able to contact people, so they essentially could make anyone they wanted believe whatever they said about me and i couldn't stop them
6. i felt like i needed their approval to live, even though i rarely, if ever, got it.
i'm not a women, but i've been in an unhealthy, controlling relationship before. as a matter of fact, i'm still living with that same person, although we are no longer "together." perhaps this is an interesting bit of insight into your question?
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I'm really not a fan of Legal Eagle lately, he's gotten very political in the past few years, and frankly a lot of his opinions are just that, opinions, with no bearing on actual law. It's pretty clear that he is a supporter of big government, and he would support almost any law that gives more power to the government, or at least to his favored political party.
Cheveron Deference prescedance led to a lot of abuse of regular law abiding citizens by federal agencies. As a German, I'm sure you don't care for guns, but a lot of Americans care about being able to defend themselves just as much as they care about free speech. Federal agencies like the ATF and FBI have been going wild with the massive authority granted to them by cheveron deference to screw over gun owners by suddenly declaring their legally acquired property as being criminal and forcing them to either destroy their firearms without compensation or else face severe criminal penalties worse than many violent criminals face. The people running these agencies are either extremely ignorant of the subject matter and the implications of their rule changes, or are downright malicious with how they abuse their authority, and I suspect it is more of the latter. We are better off without Cheveron Deference, the authorities simply can't be trusted with that kind of power, least of all the unelected ones.
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He became really political a couple of years ago, his content has taken a nose dive. I've stopped watching him since that.
Half of the stuff he talks about isn't even legally sound, but rather is just a certain interpretation of the law which is politically convenient to some, but is by no means consensus.
Cheveron Deference for example was a terrible prescedant which put everyone in a legal limbo where legal conduct could suddenly be declared illegal by federal agencies changing their mind on how to interpret the law. It affected many people in many fields, but the part I'm most familiar with is the kind of hell it made life for gun owners. Basically, a gun I legally bought suddenly became a felony to own, at which point I am legally required to destroy the weapon or face prison time. Then a year later, it became legal again. This was all without any new laws being passed, it was all up to unelected burecrats changing their mind about what should be legal or illegal. For anyone who followed the law and destroyed their property worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, they were offered no form of compensation by the government, and they can't magically reform their destroyed firearm because the federal agency decided to undo a rule they made on a whim. Cheveron deference was terrible for anyone who doesn't have absolute faith in the government to always do the right thing.
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I came over to Trump in 2020 after being disillusioned from politics for a long time. I remember when the Democrats cheated Bernie from the primary in 2016, so really, it's the Democrat establishment who are to blame for Trump becoming so popular in the first place.
I saw the Tucker Putin interview. I still think Russia's invasion was bad, but Putin listed off all of the US's foreign policy interventions in Ukraine, rigging of the Ukranian elections, turning Ukraine into a puppet state, etc. and he didn't have to make any of it up because it all happened exactly as he described. Perhaps Russia would have invaded otherwise, but the US turning Ukraine into a puppet state made the Russian invasion inevitable.
The appeal of Trump to me is that he is America first, he never cared to dick around in foreign countries. He didn't always deliver, but at least he tried to appeal to the working class, something the Democrats stopped doing a long time ago. They're all about corporate money now. The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans are the rainbow flags.
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@kimobrien. Labor is a market too. Businesses need to compete for skilled labor. Unskilled labor won't be worth much, but anyone with any kind of actual skills is a rare commodity for businesses who have to pay competitive rates or miss out on highly productive skilled workers. You can see evidence of this in the fact that the vast majority of Americans make above minimum wage, and of those, most are teens and young adults with few skills who will soon move onto higher paying jobs.
There is actually a cost of living crisis in the US, but this is caused by a number of factors. First of all, many things we need (housing, medical care, etc.) are heavily regulated, thus artificially increasing their cost. Zoning laws can limit available housing and result in very high rent for example. The other part is that wages actually are not keeping pace with inflation. This is not explained by steadily increasing greed across all markets, businesses are always equally greedy. Rather, an over-abundance of educated workers has decreased the value of an educated worker.
Too many college graduates has saturated the labor force with so many educated and debt laden young adults that companies can easily bid down their wages due to there being so many young educated people. Evidence of this being a major factor is that career paths that have kept pace with inflation are trade jobs. Trade jobs are seen as "dirty" and undesirable compared to higher education. The hugely disproportionate number of college graduates compared to trade school graduates means that plumbers and electricians are often out-earning college graduates simply due to higher demand for the trades due to less market saturation.
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@kimobrien. Unskilled labor cannot replace skilled labor in many cases. Businesses do what is most profitable. If it is more profitable to use machines than large numbers of skilled laborers, then guess what, someone has to build those machines, run them, maintain them, thus creating more, higher paying jobs. I'm an industrial worker, and I can say that skilled labor is very important in my field, it is literally impossible to replace what I do with unskilled labor. To the contrary, the biggest threat to me is MORE skilled and higher paid workers qualified to run a more modern and capable version of my machine with higher output potential.
Labor is important to profit, but not all labor is equal. Higher skilled labor is worth more, especially in fields with a shortage of skilled workers. Anyone can dig a ditch, but a backhoe operator can dig the ditch faster than an entire team of men with shovels, so that machinery operator can be paid ten times as much as a guy with a shovel because he is capable of doing more than ten times the work.
Also, to be clear, I do not support excessive military spending, or government spending in general. The US is far too militaristic, we waste too much money on both the military and social programs which belongs in the pockets of citizens. Lowering the taxes on the working class would do more good for them than would maintaining the tax rates and spending a portion of those taxes on social programs. Militarism does very little for the average worker, and serves primarily to allow the government to funnel taxpayer money to the weapons manufactures.
I actually agree with you on our need for sound money. The federal reserve is yet another way for the government to control our money by siphoning value away from our savings accounts through inflation. Inflation is essentially a tax on the middle class, since they tend to have most of their savings as dollars in the bank, and thus are hit the hardest by inflation. A commodity backed currency would do the average citizen a great deal of good, but we're unlikely to see that in the near future since the government and corporations who run it benefit from controlling our money. I may have different solutions than you, but many of my criticisms about the government and, to a degree, the corporations, will likely be the same ones you have.
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As a populist libertarian, I'd say this is a fairly accurate representation of my perspective. I appreciate that you kept your pollical bias to a minimum here, often those who talk about populism are only there to bash anyone who embodies it.
Populism can be somewhat binary in nature, and I don't deny that. It necessarily simplifies things because populism is focused primarily on dealing with the problems caused by a corrupt political establishment. That doesn't mean that all populists are stupid and have a poor understanding of politics, although that is the stereotype. Some populists are very well informed, but the inherently binary nature of populism means that we need to work harder than usual to maintain a level of nuance.
One of the greatest issues that populism faces in practice is replacing a corrupt establishment with something better. Frankly, that's a pretty hard thing to do no matter your ideology, and there is a very diverse array of populism ranging from far left socialists, to far right fascists (although there is a surprising amount of overlap with socialists, leading to speculation about horseshoe theory) to more centrist libertarians. Personally, I'm a slightly right leaning libertarian, and I don't think very highly of socialists or fascists, because I believe they'd create an establishment even worse than our current one given the chance, and we'd be back to square one.
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Spoiler alert: Iowa mauls the Yamato from long range with accurate gunfire. Battle is over within less than an hour. The US ships were faster, and their advanced radar and fire control systems gave them a huge advantage in naval gunnery.
The Yamato was a formidable warship, but it relied on outdated and flawed technology, and while it was more conventionally powerful than the Iowa class battleship, it was generally less effective. It's guns were only marginally more powerful, but had hugely inferior accuracy at range. It's armor, although thick, was of much lower quality, and it's torpedo protection in particular was weak for such a large ship due to poor quality construction. The Iowa had some of the best anti aircraft defenses in the world at the time, and while the Yamato did have a large number of AA guns, they were less effective than the Iowa's guns.
The Yamato's main advantage is it's stronger armor. It is, despite it's shoddy (by comparison) construction, a very large, heavily armored and durable warship that could survive powerful weapons fire for an extended period of time. However, durability alone would not be enough to carry the day against such a technologically superior opponent under most circumstances. Luck, crew experience and any supporting fleets would play a significant role, but the Iowa was simply a better equipped ship overall, and in a one on one engagement (or in a fleet setting,) the Iowa is the superior ship in most respects.
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@belteshazzarbenyakovleib1071 Yeah, it's called a tandem warhead. They are relatively effective against ERA. They're not perfect, and sufficiently thick composite armor can still stop them. There's a reason newer Javelin models are top attack, because no matter how advanced your warhead, sufficiently thick modern armor can still stop it, so they design top attack missiles to target a common weak point on most modern tanks: the turret roof armor.
Also, one thing to note, the vast majority of the Russian tanks confirmed knocked out in Ukraine were not equipped with a modern APS system. A handful have older, less effective soft-kill systems.
Finally, just because a cheaper weapon has the potential to defeat a more expensive weapon in theory does not automatically make the more expensive weapon obsolete. In the early days of steam powered warships, the British were worried that the relatively new concept of torpedo boats would make their battleship fleet obsolete overnight by providing a cost effective way of combatting them. While torpedo boats, and later destroyers did prove to be effective at fighting larger warships, said larger warships such as battleships stayed relevant for many decades due to the evolution of tactics, weaponry and doctrine. Quick firing small caliber guns provided effective defense against torpedo boats, and battleships rarely sailed without escorting smaller ships such as destroyers and cruisers. In a similar respect, the rising threat of ATGMs on the modern battlefield will threaten especially older tanks, but modern militaries will adapt by equipping their tanks with APS systems, improved top armor, and being much more careful to keep tanks supported by infantry at all times (which is generally advisable anyways, but much more important now.)
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I live in Connecticut, and I can assure you, getting a gun is fucking difficult. You have to take a safety class that costs around $80 and a week of your time. You then take your certificate and go to the local police department. You ask them to take your fingerprints, which most departments only do during certain times of day.
Assuming you get this far, you then spend more money and time to apply for a permit. Getting the permit can take several months, sometimes close to a year, and cost several hundred dollars. This permit must be renewed every 5 years (for a recurring fee of course), missing the renew date forces you to go through the whole process again. Your permit can be taken away at any time and your guns confiscated for any reason, no charges even need to be filed. Your neighbor could be in a bad mood, call the cops, report you and your guns will be seized and destroyed with no charges being pressed or trial of any kind.
To purchase a firearm, you enter a gun store, present your valid ID, present your permit, and wait sometimes upwards of an hour for them to do a full background check on you. If it comes back clean, you can then purchase a firearm and ammunition. A decent quality handgun, rifle or shotgun typically costs at least $400.
Now that you own a gun, you have dozens of different laws to follow regarding the use and storage of it. You can be jailed for keeping it loaded, for failing to lock the gun up, for locking the gun up in the same place as ammunition, for transporting the gun in your car on the way to the range. If someone breaks into your house or car and steals your gun, you will be found guilty of criminal charges for allowing your gun to be stolen. If crimes are committed with that stolen gun, you are likely to face accessory charges for them.
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@kimobrien. No, it's done with the objective of raising the ratio of production to cost. This very often means fewer, more highly skilled and higher paid workers. As I described earlier one skilled worker is worth several unskilled laborers. It is worth paying one skilled worker three or even five times the wage as an unskilled worker because the machinery they operate makes then ten or more times as efficient. This is beneficial to both the employer and the skilled worker since now both are making more money, and everyone else benefits from cheaper products.
Many historians have actually made compelling arguments that slavery was a huge handicap for every society which used it since the abundance of cheap labor negated the need to innovate and industrialize. The Romans invented an early steam engine, but it was a novelty because they got slaves to do the grunt work and had no need for machines. The industrial revolution happened after slavery had largely been abolished in the west since innovators needed a new way to do work cheaply, thus steam engines rose to prominence.
Yes, the path forward is to do as much work with as few people as possible, but those workers who are left will have advanced technical skills and appropriately high wages. A vastly more productive society is beneficial to everyone. If you need half as many people to produce a tire, a T-shirt, or a laptop, that reduced production cost gives competitors more room to bid down each other's prices through market competition. Monopolies do happen, but usually only in industries with very high entry costs, so simple goods that are not heavily regulated tend to fall in price, increasing the buying power of currency by decreasing the cost of goods. This does not account for inflation, which is a government scheme to steal the buying power of people's savings.
The government should stay out of the economy. The largest corporations push for more government regulation and interference in their industries since they can tailor those regulations to suppress competition and allow market monopolies. Small to mid-sized companies are harmed by regulations, leaving more room for the large corporations to squeeze the market.
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Separate message for the purpose of length. On your listed tendencies of populists, I'd say 1 and 3 are mostly true, and 2 is with a huge caveat. I think you're not necessarily wrong on 4, but honestly, political parties tend to be self serving entities, and that doesn't seem unique to populism. Also, part of being a populist is having little political power, if the populist movement has a lot of political power, they're well on their way to becoming the new establishment. Anyways, here are my perspective on populist tendencies 1 through 3
1. Removing intermediaries. This is very much true, and for good reason. The political establishment, in the case of the libertarian movement in the US, tends to have a lot of editorial power, and consequently, censorship power over what gets published. In order for the populist message to get out, it is necessary to bypass establishment controlled media. Considering the number of libertarian and non-mainstream conservatives who have been censored on Twitter, had their names smeared on the likes of CNN and MSNBC, and even FOX, using mainstream media really isn't an option for a populist movement. Establishment media won't host anyone critical of the establishment for obvious reasons, so we're forced to use podcasts and other ways to share our perspective.
2. Externalizing blame. Sure, we do that. But question: what political movement doesn't? Few political movements will outright admit that their policies have failed, and on the very rare occasion that it does, it nearly always tries to push the duty of repentance onto someone other than the actual perpetrator of the failed policy. Actually, being burdened with someone else's failures (high taxes to pay off national debt) is often a core component of populism.
3. Conspiracy theories. Yes, populists are conspiracy theorists. I'm a conspiracy theorist. And frankly, I've been proven right on several of them lately. Populists are what they are because they are very critical of the political establishment, and if the establishment engages in things like insider trading, corruption, human trafficking (Epstein's island), black market dealings (CIA funding rebel groups), and other shady activities, yes, populists tend to be very suspicious at any hint of shady activity by the political establishment.
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@yordideleon6627 I'd say that in the US, the Democrats are the progressive movement, and Republicans, who are the conservatives, have actually come to embody liberal values rather well. The Overton window has shifted to where the Republicans, who are conservative by default, happen to be working to preserve liberal values at the moment. As a libertarian and classical liberal myself, I find myself aligned, somewhat apprehensively, with the more populist leaning Republicans in the hope of getting some actual positive change and restoring some of the core values of liberty that the US was founded upon.
I've heard leftists claim that Republicans are "far right", but I think that comes from their far left perspective. Europe as a whole tends to be extremely far left to the point where classical liberalism is dead, speech is censored, rights are trampled, and dissent is punished. It's kind of strange since in the past, the dictatorships always used to hate gays or jews or something, but the modern equivalent in the far left progressive movement just seems to hate anyone who isn't both a member of the movement, and anyone who isn't a minority of some kind. I suppose that speaks to the marxist origins of the modern progressive movement of framing everything as oppressor vs. oppressed, and assuming that anyone with any semblance of privilege is evil. This socialist type of tendency is rather populist in origin, but it goes to show how quickly populism can turn authoritarian if the ideology behind the movement is rotten.
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@yordideleon6627 The Democrats may be more liberal in the modern sense of the word, but they have completely abandoned classical liberalism as a school of thought. The term "post-liberal" refers to classical liberals who have abandoned the increasingly far left Democrat party and find themselves politically homeless, but perhaps slightly right leaning. Some identify with center-right Republicans or Libertarians, as they share many of the same classical liberal values.
NPCs do exist on the right. Some hardcore Trump voters for example are not very politically informed, but as a general rule, large portions of the Democrat voter base tend to be relatively uninformed. They get most of their information from a handful of establishment or establishment aligned sources. Some less respectful stereotypes include welfare queens and blue haired university students, and slightly more respectful stereotypes include old boomer and Gen Xers who were never really politically involved but who have always voted Democrat mostly out of tradition and nostalgia.
As a whole, the majority of both Democrat and Republican politicians are rather corrupt and worthless, and neither party is universally better than the other. There are a handful of good politicians on both sides, but until a large portion of well informed voters vote in primaries to get rid of establishment swamp monsters, neither party has much hope of reform. There is a recent push for more populist candidates on both sides, but the push for populist Republican candidates has been slightly more successful overall. They can count Trump, DeSantis, Ron Paul, Amy Comey Barret and others among their ranks. Populists among Democrats have been much sketchier. AoC and Bernie are notable examples of populist Democrats who basically sold out to the establishment, but Tulsi Gabbard is a Moderate populist Democrat who is well liked by moderates from both parties, even if her policies are slightly more left leaning. I almost forgot to mention Andrew Yang. He's so steadfast in his honesty that he's been sabotaged by his own party for not selling out.
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i consider myself a lazy person, and while there are some people who really, truly do not want to work and will do anything to avoid doing so, many people would be willing to work for a more comfortable standard of living.
i believe that we should give everyone the bare minimum, just enough to live by, and encourage them to seek employment to supplement their basic income. the majority of people would be willing to work for the extra money. many low wage workers actually cannot consistently afford food, running water, electricity, or even sometimes rent, and a universal minimum wage would give them the boost necessary to actually make a living rather than just barely scraping by.
the universal minimum income doesn't even necessarily need to be enough to afford all of the basics of living a normal life, it just needs to be sufficient to allow someone working full time making minimum wage to live.
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The earth's temperature fluctuates naturally with time. Why do we assume that the exact temperature that we are at now is the perfect temperature? The earth was much warmer and cooler at various points throughout history, and life has flourished regardless. Our push for green energy solutions is largely a political one, and the proposed solutions such as electric cars and solar farms will not eliminate carbon emissions, nor even reduce them by very much.
The amount of fossil fuels burned in the mining and manufacturing processes necessary to produce a solar panel is only slightly less than the amount of energy generated by the average solar panel's expected lifetime. Put simply, it would be just as environmentally friendly and much more cost efficient to burn oil for power than it would be to use that oil to build solar panels. Additionally, solar and wind power don't work. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow, and sometimes the sun doesn't shine. When the sun stops, we need backup (likely fossil fuel powered) generators to make up the difference. And no, giant banks of batteries are not the solution. Batteries are enormously expensive, and require huge amounts of toxic rare earth elements on the scale necessary to store cities worth of energy.
We do actually have an environmentally sound method for producing energy. Nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is, in many ways, the perfect power source. It produces few pollutants, and it generates huge amounts of power for a comparatively small investment. France uses large amounts of nuclear power for its energy needs, and they have some of the cheapest energy in Europe. Germany uses large amounts of solar, wind, and similar renewables, and they suffer from some of the highest energy costs in Europe.
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@kurtsudheim825 If you don't stop criminals, there will be more crime. If you criminalize self defense, there will be a LOT more crime.
Most confrontations where a would be victim is armed do NOT end in a shooting. In around 98% of these instances the aggressor backs off and the would be victim does not need to use their weapon.
Also, a home invasion is very different from a mugging. In neither case should a victim EVER be required to allow themselves to be robbed, but home invaders absolutely do deserve to be shot. Home invasions can cause severe emotional trauma to a target, and if home invasions are allowed to continue, more are almost certain to follow.
Also, how do you know that it's a mugger? They could be a rapist. Rape happens, and a woman shouldn't have to allow herself to become a victim of rape because the government decides that she doesn't need the right to defend herself. Victims of rape almost always buy a gun to defend themselves, or try to only to find out that their state makes it almost impossible to do so. A friend of mine living in New York wanted to buy a gun to protect him and his family from a wave of anti-semetic hate crimes, only to find out that Democrat politicians have made it virtually impossible to legally own a gun in New York.
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@TheKalkara131 Not really. Sure, people experiment with things, but it's very rare to have a hybrid propulsion system unless each stage serves a specific purpose. Rockets use multi-stage systems because each stage functions best at a specific altitude.
We already have chemical explosive based firearms, and they work great. MAG weaponry is likely to see some use as technology surrounding it improves. But combining the two is unlikely to be beneficial due to the fact that there is no real advantage to doing so, and there are several penalties.
First, the extra cost, complexity and maintenance required for a hybrid gun/ railgun means the system is going to be much more expensive and prone to breakages. If a gun works better for a task, just use a gun. If a MAG weapon works better, then use that. Another disadvantage is that both a gun and a MAG weapon have a base weight and size cost associated with them. A gun needs to weigh a certain amount because components such as the barrel, chamber, magazine, etc. can't really be skimped on. And MAGs require batteries and capacitor banks, which can't be made more compact without sacrificing performance. A basic gun or a railgun will weigh less and be simpler to operate than a hybrid.
The only exception that I can think of is to use a railgun as a launching mechanism for a missile, provided you could overcome the problem of the EMP surge frying the electronics on the missile. Sure, a rocket motor isn't really a "gun", but it has some advantages over other hybrid systems.
The railgun gives the missile extra range and altitude, and the missile and guidance systems allows the missile to be much more accurate, especially against moving targets than an unguided projectile. Sure, you could just use a larger missile with more fuel to achieve the same range as the railgun launched missile, and indeed, that may be the better solution, but similar concepts already exist of gun-launched smart projectiles, and missiles have already been miniaturized to a surprising degree, so firing one out of a gun, magnetic or not, should be doable. The closest real world equivalent are modern Russian tanks whose guns are capable of firing guided missiles in addition to standard types of shells, although this is still a single stage weapon as the gun is nothing more than a launch tube.
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I have to say, the modern left in the US has largely abandoned liberalism. The progressive movement is decidedly collectivist and anti-liberal in nature, and even appears to have strong socialist and even fascist tendencies. The result of the abandoning of liberal principles by the left has led to "post liberals" fleeing the traditionally liberal, but now increasingly illiberal Democrat party and forming an alliance with center-right conservatives. Indeed, it could even be argued that conservatives are now synonymous with liberals as modern conservatives are fighting (albeit not always effectively) to preserve liberal institutions from the illiberal progressive movement.
For anyone who believes that progressivism is liberal, keep in mind that the progressive movement is pushing racial segregation (segregated dorms, race based hiring practices) censorship, and restriction of a wide swath of rights such as the rights to privacy and freedom of speech. The progressive movement seeks to use the power of state institutions to enforce the woke ideology, and punish those who dissent from it. It's not quite nationalism, and it's not quite religious zeal, but some strange hybrid thereof. Indeed, the progressive movement has become so ruthless in upholding it's ideology that it seeks to punish severely anyone who engages in otherwise minor crimes such as misgendering a trans person or simply not caring about the category (race, sex, orientation, etc.) of others. It's a strange perversion of harm reduction that has become a religiously upheld dogma, held together by a common sense of unity among the far left progressive movement, and rigorously enforced.
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I absolutely do agree that the F-35 has had some serious cost overruns, and they have kind of screwed the American taxpayer in that regard. That being said, it's actually a much better aircraft than most people give it credit for. It was advertised as a master of all, a plane that could excel at every possible air combat role at once. No aircraft can be the best at everything, compromise is a normal part of designing a weapon system. You can either built a super effective specialist aircraft designed to excel at one role, but lacking in other areas, or you can build a jack of all trades which is reasonably effective at multiple mission types but can be out-performed by a specialist aircraft. The F-35 is the latter. It's a stealthy and effective fighter, but not as stealthy as the F-22. It has a decent bomb and missile load, but the strike variants of the F-15 can carry a larger payload. It can do short takeoff, but it still needs a short runway, it's not a helicopter. It's an all around above average plane, with an above average price tag to match.
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I'm on the side of all lives matter. While I do believe that the lives of black people matter too, I don't support the BLM movement. Many of the people who do have nothing but good intentions, but it's leaders have some very questionable goals and ideologies, and the protests very frequently devolve into violent looting and rioting. This is not always the fault of BLM itself, but even when it is caused by another, more extreme far left group like Antifa, BLM protests (which often start peacefully) are usually the inciting event.
As far as black people being discriminated against... It varies wildly from city to city and in what way, but from what I have seen, many claims of discrimination are either factually untrue, or based on skewed data. While black and hispanic people may indeed face more challenges on average, much of this is due to socio-economic status (wealth), as well as family and cultural influence.
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@janetmerai I think Youtube censored your reply. I can see it when typing a reply, but if I actually search for it in the stack, it disappears. And yes, you are right. A large number of young millennials and zoomers are transgender communists. They've been brainwashed by schools and media teaching woke values.
While there is some biological aspect that may make one more likely to be a communist or transgender, these are still learned behaviors. (Some people have personalities that naturally lean more towards collectivism, and gender dysphoria is a mental disability often experienced very young in one's life, and unethical experiments conducted by John Money which attempted to imprint gender dysphoria on young children failed to produce any results.)
Putting aside one's genetic or biological disposition towards mental conditions such as collectivism and gender dysphoria, ideas such as communism and transgenderism need to be taught to children, be it through woke parents, teachers, the internet, or other means. One example of this is that Antifa groups are generally overtly marxist in nature, with the few exceptions all generally having some brand of socialist influence. Antifa groups have very high amounts of transgender members, exceeding the percentage of the general population many times over. Looking at the pushback met by Florida's anti-grooming bill, it becomes obvious that the political left is attempting to push toxic ideas onto children without parent's knowledge or consent, using schools as their vehicle to do so.
Transgenderism is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be an effective way to deal with gender dysphoria. However, most who are familiar with the trans community will attest to the fact that there are a growing number of de-transitioners who are trying to return to some semblance of their birth gender. Most will admit, often ashamedly, that they were encouraged and pressured into transitioning by groomers, often at a very young age. Excessive support for transgenderism and praise of transitioners, beyond what would be necessary to normalize the practice, have led to an increase in children transitioning who do not experience gender dysphoria, which is very often a mistake. Extensive hormone use alone can permanently alter the body, a fact which is often glossed over and ignored by those pushing for more gender transitions. The result of this recklessness, if not outright malice, will be an entire generation of adults whose bodies and minds are permanently damaged by this trend.
The push for Communism is equally insidious. Communism is a terrible system which empowers a few individuals at the expense of the freedom and wealth of an entire society. Despite claiming to do the opposite, Communism always leads to tyranny by putting all of the power in the hands of an elite few central planners. It's not hard to see how some people believe they could benefit by implementing it as a system, with them at the top. Many of the people who push for communism are not aware of the horrors brought about by this sinister ideology, and some even deny atrocities such as the holodomor and the great leap forward, much the same way that neo-nazis often deny the holocaust ever happening. If Communism were ever implemented in the west, millions would die as a result, and most of the remainder would suffer under an oppressive boot for generations to come.
Also, just to be clear, I'm not claiming that the US is perfect, we have a corrupt, borderline feudalistic system in place, I'm simply claiming that, despite all of it's flaws, even a corrupt republic led by establishment scum is still better than communism. I'm also not any of the LGBT phobics, I simply oppose the collectivism and normalization of mental illness which often accompanies the mainstream LGBT movement. Normalizing pedophilia is not a civil rights movement I can ever support.
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@belteshazzarbenyakovleib1071 Dones and Javelins are great, but they don't make tanks obsolete. Any vehicle, even an armored vehicle, is vulnerable to ambush if it's alone and unsupported in enemy territory. This has been the case since WWII. Just because a military misuses an expensive piece of equipment and loses it to enemy action doesn't make that piece of equipment obsolete.
Modern APS provides a high degree of protection against even modern ATGMs. Newer tanks may begin incorporating better top armor to resist top attack ATGM fire, and this can be seen in some cases with tanks having ERA bricks on the turret roof.
As long as a big mobile armored gun is a useful asset to have on the battlefield (which seems to be the case for the forseeable future,) the tank will continue to be an integral part of any modern military, and it will adapt over time to the changing battlefield. It's very often in history that a new piece of technology comes out, or proves itself, and everyone immediately assumes that this piece of technology is the death knell for another piece of weaponry. While this has been true in some cases, much more often, the existing weaponry simply adapts to the altered battlefield and says relevant for some time.
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out of curiosity, does anyone else notice that you or people you know fit some but not all of the traits? and is there a definitive difference between a psychopath and someone who has only mild psychopathic tendencies? or what about the same thing for a sociopath? is there a fine line between crazy and sane? or are we all just somewhere in between broad and nonspecific categories?
i dont feel the need to shed a tear when someone dies, and i am easily bored by things most people enjoy. i am rather talented at manipulating others through various means, although i usually try to avoid having to manipulate people to achieve my goals unless necessary. i sometimes make irresponsible and impulsive choices, am a skilled liar and deceiver (and even take pride in being able to deceive others without telling a direct lie.) i very often find myself thinking low of others although i usually keep this to myself, and i have very little respect for rules that i see as pointless or do not agree with.
despite having some sociopathic tendencies (more so than psychopathic ones, although some of the signs are similar), i generally am able to control my impulsiveness, actually can feel empathy for another even if that person is not in some way beneficial to me (although i often choose not to in order to minimize potential damage when others are suffering or die.) i also am usually honest about things that really matter to other people, at least to people that matter to me.
maybe we aren't either normal or weird (psychopath, sociopath, just plain crazy, ect.) maybe placing everyone in one of these categories is oversimplifying things.
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Hope Forpeace well, at least you recognize that your opinion may be clouded to some extent. most people are shockingly close minded about ideas that contradict their own.
you're not entirely wrong, natural gas definitely does cause damage to the environment. the thing is, it's less harmful overall than most other fossil fuels, and while making the transition to more plentiful and less destructive forms of energy, we do need some sort of middle ground that balances the quantity available with both economic viability and environmental impact. natural gas obtained via fracking, for all it's risks, is still probably the best bet to be that middle ground.
in the long term, solar energy is a decent small scale solution, but it is better suited for powering individual homes and businesses as a supplementary source of energy. larger scale solutions would likely have to be consistent high output sources such as hydroelectric or geothermal. unfortunately, both of the previously mentioned sources of energy are situational, and hydroelectric does have some localized environmental disruption.
overall, the best source of energy available to us in the long term would be nuclear energy. there are three ways we could harnass nuclear energy that would be effective at powering large cities. first would be to use our current reactor designs to power cities the way we always have. the drawbacks come in the form of a small but terrifying risk of catastrophic failure, as well as the difficult to dispose of toxic waste produced by them.
the second way we could harnass nuclear energy would be to use other forms of equally effective and overall safer methods of harnessing it, molten salt reactors being one of the most promising methods. molten salt reactors are dozens of times more efficient at using their nuclear fuel, using an estimated 98% of the potential energy of nuclear material as opposed to around 1%. because of this, the waste they do produce is already nearly spent of radioactive material, and is much safer than the waste produced by current reactor technology, fully degrading into a virtually harmless state after only a few decades. the downside to molten salt reactors is shared with just about anything that has the word nuclear in it: people are afraid of it, and many people immediately assume it must be dangerous.
the third method is nuclear fusion. it's a nearly limitless supply of clean and safe energy, and it's only drawback is that science hasn't yet managed to find a way to make it a viable source of energy yet, as we're still barely breaking even on the amount of energy produced by fusion reactions.
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aww man.i thought it was going to be bay formers, i dont even really like G1. oh well, in bay series/ movies, my favs are brawl (aka devastator), scorpnok, shockwave (anyone without shockwave on their list has problems), soundwave, rampage, barracade, crowbar, megatron, prowl, laserbeak and maybe bonecrusher. of coarse there's a few i also like but probably missed... and no, starcream definitely did NOT make my list. he is far too whiny and the only remotely cool thing about him is his alt form. oh, and optimus makes the list too, probably the only non decepticon character to do so... by a stretch, i suppose ironhide, the wreckers and warpath could also, but warpath doesn't really have a movie appearance and the only reason why the wreckers make is it is because their altforms are fast cars covered in guns like something of a mashup between the Spyhunter car, Bond's Austin and... a really cool looking pile of guns duck taped to a car.
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he did lose his army of souls at the end, but he still has the power of shrodinger. he is literally an immortal, omnipresent being. there are some extremely dangerous weapons in the hellsing verse such as anderson's silver tooth that turned him into a divine monstrosity of enormous power. in this form, he was possibly the only thing in the hellsing verse able to threaten hellsing in his release level 0. but when he kills all of his reaped souls except shrodinger, he traded the strength of millions of souls for the power of a being who can be killed, yet never destroyed because he is everywhere and nowhere at once. he hasn't simply transcended reality, he's all but become reality. he can be anywhere, everywhere and nowhere all at once. he is basically a god.
i know very little about dio, but unless he can warp reality itself, he has literally no chance whatsoever of killing alucard. yes, dio can stop time which shows at least some form of reality warping, but i believe that is only in a localized area, and i don't think he has ever shown any ability to warp reality aside from stopping time... which leaves him without the necessary powers to kill alucard. i'm not even sure that reality warping would be sufficient to kill him unless they could manipulate everything that exists in the 3 physical and 1 temporal dimensions simultaneously.
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Guts the power of Schrödinger is stated and demonstrated several times throughout the anime to grant omnipresence. death is permanent in the hellsing verse, yet Schrödinger came back from having his skull blasted apart by a shotgun.
as for being stuck in an infinite death time loop... Schrödinger is said to exist everywhere and nowhere all at once which means that he could simply not exist within that time loop, and exist somewhere else instead.
although it's full potential is never demonstrated in the anime due to Schrödinger being a secondary character and Alucard not gaining the power until the very end, it is very likely that the power of Schrödinger could even allow alucard to exist in multiple places at once, creating infinite copies of himself. also, there is the simple fact that destroying or even trapping one such physical manifestation of himself (even if he can only create one such physical manifestation at once,) would not in any way constrict him as an entity.
saying that by somehow neutralizing alucard's physical form would be putting him down for good would be like saying that destroying a drone would be killing the operator who has countless other drones at his disposal.
just keep in mind, alucard can learn to do some pretty crazy things with his powers, and i would not be surprised if he eventually learned to will himself into existence with his fist wrapped around his opponent's heart or something equally ludicrous.
even Schrödinger, a brainwashed nazi youth who never seemed to realize even a tiny fraction of the incredible power he had, showed that he could manifest himself in other people's minds. this just hints at how much unexplored potential there is in the power of Schrödinger that alucard has yet to demonstrate, and probably would have already if the anime had not ended within minutes of him reincarnating for the first time in what may have been years since his supposed "death."
yes, much of this is speculation, but we know for absolutely sure that alucard is about as close to unkillable as any fictional character has ever come.
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Guts to exist everywhere and nowhere all at once is omnipresence. it is unknown if he possesses the ability to appear physically in multiple places, neither Schrödinger nor alucard ever had reason to use such an ability in the anime, so we can't say for sure if he does or doesn't.
the fact that Schrödinger could appear in dreams shows that there is obviously much more to his abilities than just the basic being immortal part of omnipresence, but Schrödinger never really had any reason to use demonstrate the full extent of his abilities.
it is likely that the power of Schrödinger also granted omnipresence through time itself, making him impossible to erase through the timeline as long as he could identify himself. for previously stated reasons, it's impossible to know if his powers do in fact extend to omnipresence through the timeline itself. if his omnipresence does extend through time, then yes, he's about as unkillable as they come. still, as the abilities are unknown, it's speculation if dio could actually destroy alucard or not. there's no way to know for sure.
before Schrödinger, alucard's nigh immortality was granted through extreme regeneration abilities, and he already lacked the weaknesses of normal vampires. after he gained the power of Schrödinger, he is becomes the most powerful character in the hellsing verse by far, as well as one of the hardest to kill characters in anime, ever.
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Bryn Brynhilly i know you really like dio, but just because you really like a character doesn't mean that they can automatically win every fight, even if they are really strong. if you had a greater understanding of the extent of alucard's abilities, you'd understand how even with reality warping, this fight would likely end in a draw.
alucard is about as unkillable as any anime charecter is likely to ever get, even more so due to the lack of characters of similar power levels in his own universe. i'm not sure of dio's own defensive abilities because i havent seen the series. if they're anything close to his offensive abilities, alucard might actually lack the powers necessary to put him down for good. it is possible the power of schrodinger has offensive utilities that were never demonstrated, but for the sake of staying away from speculation, we'll just assume that it's only major function is to make him really, really hard to kill.
alucard's power lies in the fact that while the power of schrodinger doesn't let him fly or fire planet destroying energy blasts, they work on a set of principles that means what they lack in flashiness, they more than make up for by breaking all the unspoken rules on how immortal an anime character can be. you can in theory, technically kill alucard, but he'd still exist and destroying his physical form would accomplish nothing. he could simply reform somewhere else an instant later. even worse, since he exists everywhere and nowhere all at once, even using a wide spread area denial weapon that has effects even beyond the physical plane such as spatial warping wouldn't prevent him from existing outside that area and simply reappearing elsewhere. he could even, in theory, reappear with his fist wrapped around the heart of his enemy, killing them in an instant.
on a side note, if you dont mind a little bit of (lot) of blood, hellsing ultimate is an excellent anime, one of my alltime favorites.
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Mossy Qualia the entire point of being nowhere and everywhere all at once is that he doesn't ever exist in one specific place, yet at the same time he does. the only practical limitation that we have any reason to suspect this power may have in that respect is that he may only be able to physically manifest himself in one location at a time, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't exist elsewhere... or that he even exists where he physically manifests himself at all.
further evidence of this is when Schrodinger appears in the mind of another character, in their very thoughts. if that character were to die at that very moment, would Schrodinger die with them due to existing there, at the time that their current place of residence (the dead person's mind) ceased to function? no, because they would still exist elsewhere. similarly, if alucard were in an area that underwent reality warping, destroying anything that exists in that area, would alucard cease to exist? he would cease to exist in that area, but live on elsewhere.
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JXZX1 their universes are different enough, and contain individuals with such distinct powers that it really is hard to compare them with characters from another series.
in alucard's universe, he was sufficiently far beyond everyone else so that unless he was attacked in a very specific way, he would essentially be immortal. just because he was by far the most powerful being in his own universe doesn't necessarily mean that he would remain immortal if beings from other universes with entirely different... or indeed, similar... powers came to interact with him.
the way that alucard's powers work, no amount of brute force alone can actually destroy him, so his foe needs to have at least some form of power that can effect the 4 dimensions themselves to even be able to fight him at all. dio has such powers. alucard's abilities are described in such a way as to suggest that he might even then me unkillable unless the 4 dimensions themselves were rewritten or destroyed everywhere all at once, but this is an in universe character's interpretation of the power of schrodinger.
i think it's safe to say that the power of schrodinger never really did demonstrate any clear limits, but that doesn't mean that we can guess that it's limits are beyond dio's abilities, nor that we can assume that the power of schrodinger is in fact, over estimated and misinterpreted by the characters in universe. perhaps it would be possible to erase alucard from the timeline, but we simply don't know for sure.
a confrontation between heaven dio and schrodinger alucard is full of speculation as those characters have never clashed with other characters possessing similar powers, and we have absolutely no idea whatsoever how their powers would interact.
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okay, there appears to be a LOT of misinformation among people whose only knowledge about guns comes from the media. whether you are pro or anti gun, here are some general facts that are free from intentional bias.
guns do not cause crime. crime rates shows significant correlation to poverty levels, removing guns from a specific region would have very little effect on crime rates. there is the argument that banning guns could reduce the likeliness of a violent crime being lethal, however, in my next fact, this possibility is explored further.
the majority of criminal activity involving the use of firearms is done using illegally gotten weapons, so imposing stricter regulation on legal gun ownership would have little effect on gun related crime unless the ban is present all across the region. even banning all firearms in a specific city would accomplish little as criminals are already acquiring their weapons through illegal and therefore unregulated methods. there IS one way to reduce shootings however...
banning all guns in an entire country and making sure that ban is effectively enforced can greatly reduce the number of shootings in that country. it does NOT eliminate violent crime from that country, and in some cases may cause an inflation in other types of violent crimes due to the combination of the criminals who would be committing crimes with guns simply using other means of violence, as well as the lack of legally owned guns making the region a safer place for criminals. how effective the threat of potentially armed prey is at dissuading criminals is unknown exactly, but many towns and cities with high rates of gun ownership also have very low rates of crime, though this may be partially attributed to other factors. still, the fact remains that banning all guns in a region and actually ensuring that they are difficult to acquire through illicit means does tend to reduce the number of shootings in that region.
guns do make suicide easier. since many people who are considering suicide are indecisive about whether or not they are willing to follow through with it, not having a gun easily available may give someone enough time to reconsider their choice. still, many places where guns are scarce or illegal have inflated rates of suicide via hanging or jumping from tall places, so banning guns does not necessarily prevent a significant number of suicides.
many "assault weapons" are really no more dangerous than weapons not classified as such. weapons that are classified as illegal assault weapons often are classified as such due to components such as pistol grips, folding stocks, and tactical rails. these objects have no effect whatsoever on how dangerous the gun is, but since it resembles something that may be present on an actual military weapon, these weapons are illegal regardless. regulating weapons based on factors such as caliber, capacity and firing capability (whether or not a weapon is capable of fully automatic fire) would be more sensible.
acquiring a gun legally is NOT easy in the united states. even getting the license to own one is a long and complicated process that involves background checks and fees of various sorts. the most likely place a criminal would acquire a gun is through the black market, and cracking down on illegal gun purchases would be more effective at disarming criminals than stricter legal regulations would be.
the second amendment does state that citizens of the united states are aloud to own firearms, however, this does not necessarily give citizens the right to own their own personal artillery. like other parts of the constitution, it is meant to be regulated in certain ways, the specifics of such regulations are down to courts to decide. however, it is NOT constitutional for guns to be banned altogether as this directly goes against the second amendment. still, having the right to bear arms doesn't give you the right to go hunting with a grenade launcher.
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4 years later and the ship models have been revamped, space stations can be constructed around planets and support planetary defense fleets, there's twice as many npc factions, the combat is smoother, the game economy has been reworked for the better, the UI is cleaner and simpler, carrier/ fighters are completely reworked, many new weapons and ships have been added, along with changes to existing ones, and much, much more. this game has a slow development cycle, but it's far from dead. there are countless other changes and improvements such as how allied fleets can join ongoing battles, often resulting in battles with three or more faction's ships all in one place.
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@lennysandroff8168 Dems voted for military conquest too. Neo-libs and neo-cons are warmongers.
Ethno-fascism? No one gives a shit about race in the US, other than the Dems who want to get rid of white people. Or, at least they did until the realize they didn't need illegal immigrants to win the vote when they can just harvest ballots.
China is a threat, but frankly, we've got a more immediate problem of authoritarians in the whitehouse and congress right now. I think the word "fascist" is corrupted, but it's not entirely wrong. They act like fascists, or socialists of some kind. They want to take away speech and guns, since those represent the main opposition to them gaining power. People will vote for socialism if you can censor the truth.
Think of it this way. As we switch over to digital currency, they can make all of our money disappear with the flip of a switch. They can already do that with our bank accounts, your bank account is nothing but a number on a spreadsheet. When they confiscate your wealth with a keystroke, you'll beg them to give you more funny money, be it through printing more or stealing it from others. At this point, it doesn't really matter. Kensyan economics has already taken over, and it allows them to print infinite money, skipping the need to steal the wealth from the rich, they can just print whatever they need and de-value the money that exists, stealing the value without even needing to confiscate it.
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@Anvilman Perhaps you're right. But history isn't always pretty, and I don't think we should forget about it just because our ancestors did some terrible things. Pride or guilt, people seem divided on which we can feel, and have little respect for those who disagree. Maybe we need a little bit of both.
Pride, because we should recognize the achievements of great men, even if they were not always good men. Erwin Rommel and Andrew Jackson were great men, but one fought for the wrong side of history, and the other planned a disasterous relocation act for the Native Americans.
Guilt not as a weapon to put down those whose ancestors did wrong, but rather to remember the suffering of those who drew the short straw in history. Perhaps we can keep ourselves from making the same mistake again if we remember the mistakes of our ancestors. Germany teaches about the atrocities their ancestors committed during the war, and their prison system is humane, and focused on rehibitation. Japan largely pretends WWII never happened, and their prison system is draconian, rivaled only by authoritarian powers like Syria or China.
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@Rundstedt1 The right to own slaves was the most significant reason for the south to want to secede, but far from the only one. Taxes for example were another contributing factor, as was nationalism itself.
I don't praise the south for trying to secede, nor for practicing slavery, but you cant pretend that an entire culture didn't exist just because that culture perpetuated terrible things. Imperial Japan did many terrible things during the war, burning cities and killing and raping many innocent people, yet their culture is celebrated with little mention of the horrors it has perpetrated. People will celebrate culture no matter what, and trying to surpress freedom of speech will polarize them against you, in some cases even encouraging radicalism.
Yeah, maybe some Neo Nazis do fly it, but the majority of southerners who fly the flag are not, and do not support slavery or racism. I've lived in Tennessee for two years. I knew a little old lady who owned a laundromat who had a Confederate bumper sticker. She also had a sign on the window to her laundromat saying "the only things meant to be separated by color is laundry". When I moved there, I genuinely expected to see racism a lot more than I did, but I really didn't. Race tensions we're almost non-existent in my workplace. People flew that flag without ever using it as a symbol of white supremacy.
For the north, the Confederate flag is demonized, but really, the problem everyone claims it poses, doesn't exist. Maybe a fraction of a percent of southern people belong to radical organizations, but you can't take away a symbol of culture just because a tiny group of people use it to represent something distasteful and offensive.
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I agree with you on the secret encounters, I didn't enjoy those. But I think the game plays very well on Ultra Violence. Ammo was somewhat scarce, but that feels intentional, and it forces you to adapt on the fly. If there are several powerful enemies in a room, you'll have a better time using the proper weapons against each, unloading on them before falling back to chainsaw/ glory kill a couple of weaker enemies to continue the ramage. It's a very smooth pattern, and a lot of fun.
I did notice in your background gameplay that you weren't really as mobile as you should be in doom, and you'll get punished for that, especially on Ultra Violence difficulty, my preferred difficulty setting. I think this game benefits a LOT from mouse and keyboard, you don't have nearly the level of speed and precision on controller you need to play this game properly.
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Guns are a part of American culture, and the right to own them is a right covered in the same document as the one that protects free speech, the right to assemble, etc. Yeah, it's possible for a country to exist without any of those things, but taking away any one of them is unthinkable in the US. People care about their liberty here, and as strange as it may seem to an outsider, guns are a part of that. Guns are what built out country, allowed us to break away from the British empire, and the additude of guns being a part of our culture, for better or worse, has existed ever since.
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The issue here isn't that Cheveron was in the right or that the government was wrong. The issue is that Cheveron Deference set a prescedant which gives government burecrats in various agencies nearly unlimited power to interpret the law to the point where it was never clear what was legal or illegal. It would be like if a local police department got to set the speed limit on a stretch of road, and kept constantly changing it without even changing the road signs, and handing out tickets to drivers who followed the speed limit on the road signs.
I'm a gun owner, so I was very badly affected by this prescedant. I own what is called a "pistol brace". Basically, it's a crappy excuse for a stock that the government defined as being legal to have on certain types of firearms where a normal stock is illegal. I won't go into detail because gun laws are mind bendingly complicated, contradictory and nonsensical. The ATF, a bunch of burecrats with law enforcement power who I have no power to vote for or against, decided that this firearm I legally purchased is now a felony crime to possess one year after I bought it. I was then required by law to destroy this $1200 firearm or face a felony conviction. I was given no compensation for complying with the law and destroying my $1200 firearm.
No new law was passed during any of this, the ATF just decided, without any involvement from congress, that they wanted to treat my legal firearm as a different class of weapon which is illegal to possess. Millions of law abiding gun owners across the country were forced to either desteoy their property or face felony convictions without any form of compensation because some mindless drone in an overfunded federal agency decided that owning a piece of plastic and rubber should be worth a felony conviction. This is the kind of power given to federal agencies by Cheveron Defrence.
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@GoldenMarrie I'm glad you don't prescribe medicine as a first resort to everything. It's necessary sometimes, but often it makes things worse. Many parents, especially mothers use it because it's the "easy way out." Children, especially boys, can be a handful, and the idea of calming them down can be too tempting to pass up. Additionally, if one puts faith in authority figures like doctors, it can be easy to convince one's self that it's the right decision, even if there exists a better path.
Single mothers are an easy target for blame because, frankly, they're kind of responsible. It's not their fault that society has conspired to put them in charge of raising children, but since it has, it's simplest to simply blame the single mothers for not being good enough, even if the odds were stacked against them. We can look to history for possible solutions, these problems didn't always exist, but the things that might work are very unpopular, especially among left wing women.
Things like easily accessible birth control, no fault divorce, biased divorce courts, dating apps, even filters on selfies put young women in a position where they hold a huge amount of power in regards to relationships and sex. This power imbalance is at least partially responsible for a lot of the problems we have in society today. I don't like the idea of using law to impose regulations on people's behavior, but maybe a softer form of simply removing negative incentives might be more acceptable to a wider audience. For example, don't use taxpayer money to subsidize birth control/ abortions, make it somewhat more intensive to break a marriage contract, or at least balance out divorce courts so marriage isn't seen as a huge risk for every man. But pushing back even in small ways like this is often seen as an attack on women.
I don't want to return to every woman being a housewife, I don't think we should strictly impose rules on people like that. But liberalism makes a lot of assumptions about how people work that appear to be wrong. Men and women aren't exactly equal, they both absolutely have important roles in society, but they specialize in different things. Most women would prefer to work less hours, or even be a stay at home parent, while most men are fine with working longer hours provided they have a partner to care for them and their children. We can and should recognize the difference between the sexes without degrading either sex.
Women entering the work place en-mass depressed wages for everyone, men and women alike, thus forcing many couples to become dual income whether they wanted to or not. It was very profitable for the government who benefits from more taxable income, but a bad deal overall for just about every normal working class family. This isn't a simple thing to undo, and I don't have any elegant solutions to this. I suspect any government program to try to undo this would be deeply unpopular and cause more harm than good. If there is a solution to this, it has to be societal/ cultural.
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@beast_pasta2392 No, you don't understand. I'm not begging for someone to break into my house so I can kill them. I'm hoping that won't happen, because I don't want to kill anyone. But if they choose to break into my house, they have made the decision to forfeit their own life for loot. I'd rather not kill anyone, but killing looters is a civic duty.
If you want to see what happens when crime goes unpunished, look up videos of what Portland has become. The entire city is in bedlam, very few stores operate because the theft was so high that remaining profitable became impossible. Theft, of cars, of consumer goods, wallets, all extremely high. Rape and murder too. You can believe in the human spirit all you want, but at the end of the day, some people are just bad, and if you don't stop them, they will destroy your society. The cops aren't allowed to arrest thieves, but a store or home owner who tries to buy a gun to protect themselves from theft and violence will be arrested for having the audacity to defend themselves when the police refuse to do so.
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@CursedWarrior100 Suppressor shouldn't be illegal. Even in england, a country with super strict gun laws, they are perfectly legal. Suppressors don't make a gun any deadlier, nor do they make a gun completely silent. Even a suppressed 9mm pistol, a relatively tame cartridge, is quite loud when firing. The difference is that it crosses the threshold into being (mostly) hearing safe, and allow you to shoot without hearing protection. There is plenty of reason for a civilian to want to own a suppressed firearm, and I can think of at least half a dozen scenarios where someone might need a gun but not have hearing protection on hand.
The assault weapon ban and high capacity magazine bans are both pointless and excessive. Assault weapons are not inherently deadlier than a normal rifle, and average, everyday handguns and rifles regularly have magazine capacities ranging from 15 to 30 rounds or more. Artificially limiting citizens to only have 10 round magazines is excessive, and puts a burden on people to comply with a law that restricts them to finding a firearm that complies with these regulations.
My father was looking into buying a 9mm handgun, only to realize that he was severely limited in his choices. Glocks, CZs, and many other common 9mm handguns have magazine capacities well in excess of 10 rounds, only a handful of manufacturers make 9mm handgun magazines that comply with this law.
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@DTT-vj9yr Yeah, I mostly agree with everything you said here. The weaponization of the justice system reflects one half of American culture which is willing to use violence, corruption and coercion to get their way. All of the recent "attempts" have been on one candidate because it's one side that is willing to use violence, and the other side is much more hesitant to do so, despite arguably being better prepared to do so effectively. It wouldn't surprise me if we get an armband enthusiast style right wing government in response to constant violence from the American left. They want totalism, and they might well get it.
It's a multi layered problem. Extremely low IQ among a population can be caused by a number of factors. Genetics, malnutrition, poor education, culture that simply doesn't select for and value intelligence, etc. Hati has all of these factors working against it. I've heard Zimbabwe was successful once, but I don't know many of the details. And yes, socialism is destructive and tends to put nations which embrace it back several decades.
Not just Australia, cold climates too. There are thriving civilizations in places where without artificial heat for half the year, people would perish from exposure.
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@PolitictalDipsit Unfortunately, Youtube is censoring most of the comments on this chain. I have very little faith in "democratic socialism," socialism of any kind leads to a strong central government, which invariably leads to corruption and oppression. That isn't unique to socialism, but socialism is one of the most reliable ways to create the circumstances for totalitarianism. The USSR, Cambodia, China, Germany (fascism is derived from socialism), Korea, Venezuela, Cuba... all of these places suffered under socialism.
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@PolitictalDipsit Free market doesn't necessarily lead to tyranny. It can, but monopolies don't tend to last long due to market competition. We have plenty of monopolies today, but nearly all of them have one critical thing in common: they are in very heavily regulated sectors of the economy. Government regulation creates the conditions for monopolies. Monopolies, the purest form of market tyranny, struggle to survive in a free market.
I find that most often the harshest critiques of capitalism are often targeted at the least capitalistic parts of modern capitalism. There are a few industries which present issues, and there is room for some regulation (environmental regulations can be important for example,) but as a whole, less market regulation actually tends to lead towards better output, better products, and often even better wages.
One example: Minimum wages. A minimum wage might sound like a great idea. It protects the worker from having their labor exploited, right? Well, here's the problem. If you're doing unskilled labor, and your labor only provides around $15 of value to the company, your employer can't afford to pay you $15, so the position never opens up, and there is no job created. Higher minimum wages reduce the number of low-skill jobs, and result in higher unemployment among less skilled people. It might not be ideal working for $12 per hour, but getting that first job can create the conditions for you to work your way up. Minimum wage earners work their way up to more respectable earnings rather quickly, but without entry level positions, that option isn't available to them. Minimum wages are an example of government legislation designed to make people feel good and get politicians elected, but which causes more harm than good, both to employers and to workers. It can drive smaller employers out of business, and cause larger companies to replace workers with automation, thus reducing the number of jobs available.
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@PolitictalDipsit No offense, but that was a little hard to read. A little punctuation and use of paragraphs would go a long way.
To some extent I agree that the free market isn't perfect, because the ultra wealthy tend to use their wealth and influence to lobby government to create laws which favor them and suppress competition. But that isn't a product of the free market in action, that is an example of government working in conjunction with a corporation to subvert the free market. That kind of thing becomes increasingly difficult to address as government grows in size. But in general, more regulation will result in a less free market, and a less competitive, more monopolistic industry. Some of the most heavily regulated industries (food, medicine, international trade) are the most heavily dominated by monopolies.
I understand your idea of capitalism being exploitative, there's some truth to it. Yes, corporations are greedy, and they would love to minimize the amount they pay their workers. But if those workers are free to leave their jobs at will and join another, better paying competitor, the corporations can't risk losing skilled workers by under-paying them for their work. As long as we have some basic worker protections in place, and as long as the industry isn't too heavily regulated, there is effectively a market for skilled labor, and employers will try to out-bid each other for more skilled employees. Skilled workers will bring in more money, and employers know this, thus are willing to pay more for workplace experience.
Also worth considering. Some employers willingly offer extra incentives to reliable, profitable workers such as paid sick leave, holiday bonuses, and a break room stocked with free drinks. While not free to the employer, the company realizes the value of skilled labor. These perks are designed to attract and retain skilled workers who bring in profit for the company. Skilled labor is NOT expendable, and any successful businessman knows this.
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@PolitictalDipsit The DeBeers diamond monopoly required massive cultural influence campaigns and a huge organized crime ring to enforce. A well organized cartel operates very similarly to a government, and in many of those diamond rich countries, diamond cartels were the defacto governments. They used this immense power to corner the market and were ruthless to shut down any potential competition. Yes, powerful criminal cartels are bad too.
Yes, but the attempt to consolidate control of the market to one huge mega-corp can't work as long as it's possible for new small upstarts to enter the market. Dominoes can never have a pizza monopoly unless they lobby the government to make permits for opening a new restaurant too expensive for small upstarts to afford. One real world example, the reason why all toy manufactures in the US are huge companies is because Mattel, a very rich toy manufacture, lobbied for heavy and expensive regulation of the toy industry which drove independent toy manufactures out of the market.
Yes, bad bosses exist because bad people exist. You can't regulate cruelty out of the human race. But by limiting structures of power, we can reduce the capacity for it. And no structure of power is more unaccountable and prone to abuse than a government.
There has never been an economic system put into practice at scale that has resulted in equal sharing of wealth across society. Any system that promotes hard work and innovation necessarily rewards some people more than others, because not everyone has as much to offer society as each other. In a free society, rich people tend to be wealthy because they provide a valuable service to society. Engineers, scientists, economists, doctors, all provide valuable services that benefit society, and are well paid for their efforts. Even ultra billionaires who are quite easy to hate, like Mark Zuckerberg have done something huge for society. I'm happy to criticize lots of stuff Mark Zuckerberg has done, I think he's a pretty bad guy. But you can't deny that a lot of people use the platform he created, and in a sense, he got his wealth because he innovated how we communicate with each other.
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@PolitictalDipsit I think GDP is a pretty good measure of prosperity, but I respect your take on collectives. I'm not a collectivist, but I can see the appeal of it. That being said, unions tend to evolve into corrupt lobbying groups, same as corporations. Maybe collectives wouldn't be so bad if the central government didn't wield so much power and bow down to special interest groups so easily. My criticisms of workers unions are very similar to my criticisms of corporatism. Lobbying to a central government subverts the free market.
Small scale collective bargaining? I've got no issue with that at all. I don't need it because I'm able to negotiate well enough on my own merits. That being said, if a union started screwing with me saying that I won't get a job unless I join the union, now that's another issue. That happens in some places, and I very much take issue with that. That being said, I won't attribute gross practices like that to all unions, I'm sure some are respectable. Personally, I've had mostly negative interactions with unions, but some people speak very highly of theirs.
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@PolitictalDipsit The theory is that with GDP comes everything else. I'd argue that letting people keep the bulk of their money and spend it how they see fit is better than having a centralized government use taxes to spend people's money for them. People know what they need better than the central planners do. Some people just don't want a centralized healthcare system.
If you're dead set on taxes as wealth redistribution, well I guess I'm not going to convince you otherwise, but I would still argue that cash payments to the impoverished are better than systems like food stamps. People generally know what is best for them. They should also have a limited duration. Sometimes people need help getting back on their feet, but nothing destroys a community quite like creating a system of dependency. The only exception are drug addicts and the mentally ill who are incapable of acting in their own self interest.
I'd say the best way to do welfare checks is that you file for them once, and you receive a certain number of checks in the mail for however many months (maybe 3 to 6 or so) regardless if you have a job or not. If getting a job ends your welfare checks, why the hell would you ever get a job? After the checks stop, you can't reapply for a period of time, perhaps a year or so. Financial assistance should not necessarily be denied to someone who is employed, it should be provided based on income level. We want to avoid disincentivising employment as much as possible. For all the criticism on America, we have some of the best economic mobility in the world, and key to improving this further is to avoid making whole families, whole communities even, dependent on government checks. We can find ways to help them without crippling their independence.
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I play on Ultra Violence, and I think based on his criticism, he hasn't quite gotten the 'flow' of combat down properly. It is possible to run out of ammo or health, but the game gives you the tools to avoid this, but balancing all of the tools at your disposal can be challenging, and takes time to learn. One example is that the chainsaw slowly recharges it's fuel over time, and the game occasionally spawns in weaker enemies for you to chainsaw/ glory kill in case you run low on health or ammo.
I played the marauder fight, and actually really enjoyed it. I died several times (this game is challenging), but it never felt cheap, it was always because of a genuine mistake I made. It was always fun, and I once I learned the pattern of that fight, figured out a strategy and executed it with few mistakes, I ended the fight with a huge smile on my face and a feeling of satisfaction for overcoming a challenge. I love facing challenges in video games, and overcoming them.
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@YourFriendlyKebab I almost can't believe you found 2016's doom easy on nightmare, I felt very challenged on Ultra Violence, at times frustratingly so. But then, maybe I got better as a player, because while Doom Eternal feels like it should have been harder, I 'got' it very quickly and fell into this intense pattern or kill kill murder death chainsaw and glory kill murder death while always being on the move both tactically to avoid attacks and strategically to position myself better. Maybe Doom Eternal really is a ton harder, but I just became very comfortable with it very quickly. In any case, I feel very comfortable with Doom Eternal on Ultra Violence, and maybe I could go back and beat Doom 2016 on Nightmare if I wanted to.
Either way, Doom Eternal feels even more intense, even more awesome than Doom 2016. I was caught off guard by the platforming, but I surprisingly was pretty okay with it, it always felt good, like when your girlfriend convinces you to let her peg you. Wait what was I talking about? Oh! Right, Doom Eternal is awesome. The combat is hectic yet stylish. It feels good and is super satisfying. That is also exactly how I describe space combat in Starsector despite the two games having little in common aside from a steep learning curve and some extremely polished combat mechanics.
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@RomanHistoryFan476AD Aircraft catapults are not a small investment, especially for a carrier that wasn't really designed to use them in the first place. The Queen Elizabeth class is a relatively small carrier, and it faces a lot more limitations than it's US counterparts. Maybe you could get the catapults to work if you could fit them, but the cost of doing so would be considerable, and it may be cheaper just to use the F-35.
Also, a lot of the criticism of the F-35 is overblown. The project has had a series of cost overruns, but this is, unfortunately, quite commonplace in modern weapons development. As for the numerous apparent flaws in the aircraft, these are the kinds of bugs that can be expected in a new weapon system, and most will be patched out as the weapon system continues to be developed. Even the really bad sounding one, the fact that firing it's cannon results in damage to the airframe, that isn't necessarily as big an issue as it may initially sound. The F-35 was initially designed without a cannon, it was intended to be a purely missile and bomb armed fighter. Lacking a cannon is not a significant disadvantage these days, as missile technology has advanced to the point where guns are mostly superfluous.
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@claiminglight That some people may abuse the law for their own gain? Yes, that is a problem. But we accept that some people are ill intentioned because the rights of ordinary citizens, including the right to self defense, are essential. Someone breaking into your home has voided their own expectation of security, because when you are in the act of committing a serious crime (breaking and entering), residents who may be under threat have every right to use force to defend themselves, their guests, and their property. A home is a sacred place, and anyone who would violate the security a home is supposed to provide for the purposes of petty theft does not belong in polite society.
On the principle of accepting that bad actors exist, we have a similar attitude towards freedom of speech. Some people will abuse that power and use speech to offend. But to try to limit that would be taking protection of speech away from the average citizen, the protester, the advocate, the comedian. Similarly, laws that weaken the right to self defense, although perhaps well intentioned, will invariably infringe on law abiding citizen's right to defend themselves. It's tempting to want to find some golden middle ground, but compromising on this is why in some places the sentence for shooting a home invader is worse than the sentence for rape or gang related murder. We cannot compromise on our fundamental rights, or we WILL lose them.
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I am a conspiracy theorist, but I've long held the belief that the conspirators are too stupid to be good at being evil. Sure, they do stuff like human experimentation, assassinating public officials, using fear to control the behavior of the people, but I believe that this is largely just the result of putting a bunch of midwit scumbags in control. They conspire from time to time, but the majority of conspiracies are small scale local things like corruption, embezzlement, extortion, election rigging, etc. None of those need to be national or global conspiracies, they could all take place on a local level in many different places at once. Thousands of poll workers could individually decide to throw out certain ballots without ever talking to each other, and a small group of corrupt FBI officials could independently decide to go after their political opposition without taking orders from any public officials.
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@coolioso808 That's a socialist framing of capitalism. Capitalism is just letting people own property and trade freely without much state interference. At a very small scale, capitalism is just two people exchanging goods without government agents trying to arrest everyone involved for not paying taxes or having the right permits.
Socialism is formed along the premise of giving control of the "means of production" (land, goods, etc.) to the people. Since that requires taking from those who own those things, in practice that just means the government takes and owns those things.
Fascism or corpratism is a halfway point between the two. Specifically referring to Italian style fascism here, Nazism is it's own thing which is in some ways, actually closer to socialsim than Italian fascism. (Both suck in their own way.) Fascism is essentially where the corporations and state cooperate, the state has indirect control over the corporations (we see this with the government ordering censorship of political dissidents) and the corporations influence the state (bribing public officals with promise of campaign funds or future high paying positions in exchange for making laws which benefit corporations.) Fascism is annoying to pin down because leftists claim it's right wing, while right wing people claim the opposite. In reality, it's kind of it's own, highly authoritarian ideology that has both right and left-wing influences.
If this was "real" capitalism, which does not exist in any meaningful way in our world today, the massive corporations would not have massive advantages written into the law for them by the government. If this was "real" socialism, the industries would be directly owned by the state itself. Even China's system in some ways more closely resembles fascism than communism, at least from an economic perspective.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of wanting great wealth for everyone, but the fact is, we don't have a fully automated industry. Labor is still very important to prosperity. If people stop working, there won't be any goods to produce, and no matter how much money you print, you won't be able to afford food, cars, smart phones if no one is making them. I would love to see people better rewarded for their work, I'm very pro-worker and am working class myself, I want to cut income tax and decrease cost of living for working class people, but the way to do that is NOT more government overreach.
Sure, but it sounds like you're using buzzwords without laying out an actual plan for it. If we de-regulate certain industries, rich people will invest their money in creating all of the technologies we need to do that for us. Our economy is not like a video game where we can decide to invest in one technology or another. If we just leave it alone, companies motivated by profit will make breakthroughs because they want to make money by selling us things we like. We can't rely on companies (or governments for that matter) to always do the ethical thing, but we can rely on companies to do the profitable thing, so we should try to make sure the most profitable outcome is the one that benefits the most people. Remove taxes on goods low and middle income people buy (food, gas, etc.) and you'll have companies competing to provide the lowest price because they want to sell us the stuff we need in the largest quantity possible.
Forget about research grants, companies want to do things cheaper and more efficiently on their own. Every greedy billionaire wants to be the first one to crack the secret to nuclear fusion power because that would let them under-bid their competition on the price they can sell energy for. That would result in cheaper electricity for all of us. Who cares which billionaire runs it, as long as we get cheap, high quality energy and goods?
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@coolioso808 Yes, the socialist framing is the mainstream framing these days. Your idea of capitalism is shaped by academics who have a socialists mindset. Capitalism is dead already, it has been for decades. I know that's a strange thing to hear, but we really don't live in a capitalist society, and the people in charge bash capitalism so hard because they realize the threat it poses to their plans. The fact is, private property is just about the last fragment of capitalism we have left, and working class people like myself will quite literally kill to keep our property from being seized by the state.
Haves and have nots are just a fact of life. There is no economic system in existence that does away with inequality. We have two choices, we can create a system with equal opportunity, or we can not. No matter what you do, you will never eradicate inequality of outcome because people have different desires and skill sets from one another. People seek different resources and use them differently. No central controller could ever account for the diverse amount of different perspectives that people have, centrally planned economies are doomed to fail because of this.
In a free market economy, people manage their own resources and trade without outside interference from the government. This absolutely is the most efficient system. No beaurecrat will ever know better than a lifelong industrialist or basket weaver how to make and sell engine parts or baskets better than the people who spend their entire lives doing just that. The only reason a government should ever intervene in an economy is to try to achieve some secondary goal at the expense of efficiency, such as banning foreign imports to support domestic industry, with the full knowledge that this will have negative repercussions such as increasing the cost of those goods.
There is a lot of bloat, a lot of people work pointless jobs. A lot of those are government jobs. I'd like to shrink government and repeal the regulation that creates such a sheltered place for bloated companies to survive when they ought to be out-competed by better run competition.
There aren't any people in space for billionaires to sell things to. They want our money, and they always will, we can use that to our advantage. As a pro-labor individual, I want to make it easier for workers to make money from their labor. We can't just abolish labor outright, that's a fantastic utopia that might someday exist but which does not now. Severing the link between labor and income will simply create a divide between those who receive income for free, and those who work hard and have their money stolen by the state to fund the unemployed lifestyle. We already have this with an expansive welfare state. We should reform welfare so it doesn't discourage people from working, one example would be instead of having a hard cut-off, slowly decrease the amount received based on one's income level, that way it doesn't discourage people from working more hours and getting raises/ promotions.
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@tuubi2783 The modern western urban monoculture is probably the furthest left wing culture in all of history. On social issues, the modern left is quite literally to the left of Stalin or Mao. You can try to frame yourself as the moderate position and everyone else as "far right", but it comes off as either closed minded or disingenuous when just about anyone outside of the urban monoculture bubble sees you as being crazy leftists.
It is true, it is possible to be further left on economics than the modern left wing establishment. Corporatism is a left of center system, occupying essentially the same space as fascism on the left-right spectrum, but it is to the right of fully socialist systems which seek to abolish private property and make corporations into government entities rather than have them be simply subservient to it. This isn't a disingenuous description of the socialist left's goals, it's an accurate description of what it seeks to do. The socialist left see the corporations as enemies only because they are not directly controlled by the government. If Amazon were a government service, nobody on the socialist left would be critical of them even if they were worse at providing services than they are currently.
If you look at anywhere else in the world today, or anywhere at any point in history with a tiny handful of exceptions (France and Weimar Germany were quite far left socially), nearly every other culture is to the right of our current neoliberal establishment. Culturally far left societies tend to adopt the concepts of "total equality" and "total liberation". Practically speaking, their goal is to remove all stigma from people for attributes and actions. This means the abolition of racism, the acceptance of gay rights, and also recognizing the rights of "child lovers", "animal lovers", refusal to punish criminals, and many other things.
The only consistent moral standard the cultural far left still have is "consent" where anything is permitted as long as both parties consent to it. They also choose to disbelieve that people can be born different despite all evidence to the contrary. This means a total rejection of genetics as a field of study, with the only exception being if genetics as a field is butchered to comply with the ideology's claim that everyone is equally capable. Obvious examples of this include the denial that men and women's bodies are different. This leads to the abolition of women's sports, and further promotes transgender ideology, who are already supported by virtue of being a repressed group.
Being a "total liberation" ideology, the cultural far left sees any repression as its enemy, and anyone who is or claims to be repressed is a victim to be saved and elevated. The abolition of many forms of bigotry can easily be seen as a positive, but it leads to problems where groups compete to be the most repressed due to the benefits granted to them for the reason of them being repressed. It also incentivizes self interested, successful people who are members of that group to prolong the problems which allow them to identify as repressed since they disproportionately benefit from the aid compared to other members of their group who gain comparatively little benefit from this aid.
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@yordideleon6627 Republicans are only really liberal because they're trying to conserve the liberal values of the US.
I'd disagree with you on the last part. The progressive movement is quite openly illiberal. They espouse racial discrimination, the abolition of equal opportunity, censorship of "offensive" speech and try to force others to live how they live. Just a few years ago, they represented a small minority of the democrat party, but recently they've gained enormous cultural power. Woke progressivism has become the new political establishment, and evidence of this is that corporations change their logos to black squares and rainbows for the respective progressive holidays. Further evidence is the blatant left wing bias of most mainstream media as well as the court system (with the exception of the supreme court.)
Part of the problem is that the center-right faction only asks for their not to be censorship, for their not to be bias. The left demands the censorship of non-left establishment voices. If only the left is calling for censorship, every single compromise will result in the censorship of the right.
We see a similar problem with courts. Very few courts, even in deep red areas, have blatant conservative activist judges. Conservative justices tend to be fair and rule on the letter of the law. Leftist judges and prosecutors tend to be activists who will let rioters and looters go free, but will lock up conservatives, and even politically neutral individuals for putting up any sort of resistance. Gun control only affects the generally law abiding centrist and right leaning citizens (and in blue areas, the penalties for violating gun laws is very harsh. Having a 15 round magazine in a place with a capacity limit is a serious felony.) Criminals who commit serious violent felonies, even murder, are often let out on parole, while anyone trying to defend themselves are locked up for decades and have their rights violated.
I live in a blue state, and I see the kind of unequal treatment that people such as myself (anyone who isn't a leftist) are regularly subject to.
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@yordideleon6627 Kyle Rittenhouse. George Floyd. There are a few others I can recall but don't remember the names of the men involved. In one, three men tried to stop a burglar, and when the burglar attacked the three men and one of them shot him, all three men were arrested, charged and sentenced to prison, including the man whose only form of participation was filming the event.
Democrats have become increasingly far left, and increasingly illiberal. Far left activists have infiltrated the Democrat party and have mostly taken it over by now. More moderate Democrats are being pushed out of the party. The courts have not been thoroughly infiltrated yet, but there are a number of rulings that have been made by activist judges. The biggest disparity is in media. Mainstream media is almost entirely controlled by the progressive establishment. This can affect court rulings, and it encourages activists everywhere to engage in street violence over things they don't even understand.
Most leftist activists who were rioting over Roe vs. Wade being overturned don't even realize that abortion remains legal in blue states. It's an army of brainwashed NPCs, incapable of independent thought. Orwell had a different word for such people, but he recognized the same phenomena. He called them something to the effect of "phonograph minds", people who will play whatever record is installed onto them by the media.
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@yordideleon6627 I think clarifying classical liberal is very important in modern politics. In the US, and to some extent, other western countries, liberal has come to be synonymous with left wing. Socialists are left wing, but they are very much opposed to classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is capitalistic in nature, and in the context of the US, it also tends to favor upholding constitutional rights. The neo-liberal establishment (of which there is much overlap with the neo-conservatives) is a warmonger party which wages war for profit and to spread liberal values around the world.
To be fair, that wasn't meant to be a complete demographic analysis. It was a brief breakdown based on common stereotypes, which tend to have some truth in reality. Anyone of any political affiliation has the potential to be mis-informed, but in my experience, the modern left regularly and consistently gets so very much wrong. This really kicked off with non-stop lies about Trump and Covid. Before that point, the left didn't seem any more prone to blatant lying than the right, but something about Trump broke the left, caused them to adopt a more extreme ideology that rejected morality and embraced the idea of gaining power at any cost. It's a sort of "the ends justify the means" approach. Seize power no matter how many lies need be told and rules broken, then implement your party's policies which will fix everything, allegedly.
The problem is how utterly useless the establishment has been in implementing policies to benefit the general public. They are almost entirely beholden to the desires of corporate special interests with little concern at all for the wellbeing of the middle and working class. There are Republican establishment politicians, and I'd say they're even a majority. But the Democrat party is, more so than the Republican party, almost entirely establishment in nature. This is backed up by polls.
Middle and working class (of which there is overlap) Americans tend to vote Republican. There are exceptions such as state employees and union workers, but that's not important for this breakdown. Democrats tend to draw votes, and importantly, funding, from the unemployed poor and the very rich (top 1% people as well as corporations.) Tech giants, billionaires and upper middle class working non-labor jobs want stronger government either for political virtue signal reasons, or because they want more regulation in their industries to impair their competition. Tech giants lobby regulators to create laws that harm tech upstarts for example. The same is true of other industries like medicine and food. The unemployed poor want stronger government because they want to keep getting welfare checks.
On that we disagree. America is too divided to mend itself through non-violent means. We have politically motivated violence in the streets and activists infiltrating every branch of government, including schools. There are talks of secession on both sides, and frankly, it might not matter if a majority oppose a violent civil war. When states openly defy the authority of the federal government under the belief that they are wholly justified in doing so, nothing can prevent the fracturing of the nation. We are very clearly split into two factions. The US is no longer one nation, it is two separate nations grasping for control of the country and it's institutions. Some on both sides actively seek to force others to live how they do. Issues like abortion and election integrity are driving a wedge through this nation, and when we finally split apart, people will suffer and the damage caused will take years, maybe decades to mend.
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@yordideleon6627 1. Classical liberalism is about, in large part, individual rights. If you don't have a right to private property, you can't have classical liberalism.
2. I'm sure there were crazy elements of the left, but Trump getting in completely broke the establishment left. There was a general sense that he shouldn't have won. Everyone knew Hillary was next in line, and when Trump won, everyone aligned with the establishment (including large sects of the Republican party) lost their shit.
3. Well, that's part of it. But there are studies that show that politicians have basically zero consideration for the voters. They only pass laws to help special interest groups. Also, mass shootings are an issue blown out of proportion and used as a political talking point. They account for a tiny fraction of violent crime in the US, unless you take what are basically falsified statistics from an activist group. Mass shootings are allowed to continue because they're a useful political tool.
4. I agree. I'm just breaking down that the Democrats are the party of the ultra rich and their serfs, while the Republicans are, to a degree, the worker's party.
5. You misunderstand, completely. I'm not calling for violence. I'm saying that violence is not only inevitable, it's already happening. The BLM riots, the January 6th capitol riot, the 2018 feminist capitol riot, several instances of domestic terrorism including running vehicles through crowds of people, politically motivated mass shootings, etc. I wish there was a peaceful solution, but it's too late for that. I really hope that I'm wrong and that everything simmers down, but I seriously doubt that it is possible to reunify at this point. The two factions in this country are split, and there is no way to reconcile them.
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@user-tz6xl4yb4n Not necessarily. Not all populist movements are violent in nature, although as a revolutionary force, violence is a constant risk for populist movements. Fascism is a far right ideology that shares much in common with socialism. It seeks to nationalize large parts of industry, similarly to how communism does the same. A far right populist movement has the potential to turn fascist if it takes power, but inversely, a far left populist movement is likely to implement socialism or communism if it takes power. Also, not all populist movements are authoritarian in nature, libertarian populists are quite steadfast in their opposition to socialist and fascist movements even if they share a common enemy in the current political establishment. Personally, I identify as a libertarian populist, and if you're curious, I'm more than happy to share my side and have a discussion. I welcome all outside perspectives, even if I might not agree with them.
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@patriotforhumanity7174 What racist group supported Trump? He probably said some kinda racist thing at some point, because, you know, he's Trump. But seriously, racists are barely a thing in the US. They exist, but they're an extremely small minority. I've met a few, but there are no actual racist "groups". The KKK is almost dead as an organization. Neo-nazis in the US are mostly edgy teens. There is not a single representative in America who would openly claim to be a fascist or a Nazi, and yet there are several who have proclaimed themselves as socialists.
Dude, you're so wrong about that. It's a known thing among the black community that abortion rates are extremely high. Kanye West recently said (and he's right about this) that more than half of black pregnancies in NYC end in abortion. Yes, white people get abortions too, but nearly half of abortions in the US are performed on black women, black people only make up around 12% of the US population. Actual white supremacists, who are, as I previously stated, rare in the US, openly approve of abortion for this very reason. If Republicans were racists, they would want more abortion access, not less. Again, I'm not a Republican, I'm just pointing out facts.
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@redknight6077 That is actually normal for a modern weapon system in development. Also, keep in mind, while Russia tends to overhype their tech as being better than it really is, the US DoD is incentivized to publicize how bad a project is going because Congress's solution to every problem is to throw more money at it. Also, since our media isn't really state controlled in the same way that Russia's is, they can cover stories about screwups in weapons development. A great many excellent modern US weapon systems started out facing a huge amount of criticism, largely from people who know very little about weapons development, including some who ought to.
Two famous examples of this included the M1 Abrams and the M2 Bradley, the development of which faced huge media backlash after a handful of trouble making pentagon bureaucrats known as "The Reformers" criticized them publicly for being too expensive and relying too much on unproven technology. Despite a lengthly and expensive development process, both turned out to be highly effective weapon systems. The F-35 is effectively the same story, but the amount of money involved is much larger because stealth jets are more complicated and expensive than tanks.
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We could create a partial Dyson without disassembling Earth. We could do a 1% Dyson using only the asteroid belt, leaving all of the planets intact. Or we could disassemble Mercury and create a larger partial Dyson. Just keep in mind that 1% of a Dyson sphere is generating more energy every minute than we do on Earth in a year.
Also, Dyson shellworlds are science fiction. If we actually built a Dyson sphere, it would either be a swarm, or a belt of individual objects connected with flexible tethers. And yes, we could live around the sun in O'Neil cylinders, and when there is a billion times more living area in those than on Earth, a single acre plot of land on Earth will become the equivalent of expensive beachfront property.
Once we have a portion of a Dyson sphere, we can start using 'starlifting' to draw materials off of the sun to assemble things without ripping planets apart. No, we aren't going to run out of sun. First of all, the Sun is very big. Second of all, by drawing heavy elements out of the star, we prolong it's life, actually increasing the time the sun has left to live.
Once a civilization has a Dyson sphere, they can travel wherever they please. They can use giant death star lasers powered by the sun to push huge spaceships around at incredible speeds, and those ships can colonize other star systems and eventually build other Dyson Spheres.
To give you an idea of the scale of a Dyson sphere, take the almost 8 billion people on Earth today. The Sun could support as many Earth's worth of people as there are people on Earth today, and every single one of them could live in luxury with their own 100 acre plot of land, while still having plenty of room left over for social services. With the amount of energy left over, you could support 99 more of that same civilization at the same time for billions of years, and have a generous amount of energy to spare. How much energy to spare? Enough to build an aircraft carrier sized spaceship every second, and power a giant laser beam that is to the death star what the death star is to a kid with a laser pointer.
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@ChircaSorin04 Why is war a good thing? Wars don't make us richer. Unless you live in Ukraine, why do you care? The only reason the political elite care is because they made personal investments into Ukraine, and now they want western militaries to intervene to protect their assets.
Additionally, if all of the most extreme claims about rising temperatures and sea levels were true, why are so many billionaires buying up beachfront property? It'd be a bad investment. People richer and smarter than us clearly don't believe the claims about rising sea levels.
Try to be more skeptical of things you hear in the future, and be especially skeptical if someone has something to gain from manipulating you. Appeals to emotions, especially fear, are powerful motivators, and there are some rich and politically powerful people out there who have a lot to gain from using fear, be it of a foreign nation, or of a climate crisis, or a political party to change your behavior. Mainstream media is owned by the rich and the political elite, and they use it to push propaganda. This isn't restricted to one political party either, and no political group is innocent of this. Everyone from the agriculture industry, to energy companies, vehicle manufactures, pharmaceutical companies, teachers unions and so many more have powerful lobbies that influence politics and media for their own profit. It's too complex to be understood easily, but start by being skeptical of every claim you hear, no matter where you hear it from.
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@LifeGeneralist Yeah, new tech starts out expensive. Fossil fuel giants have nothing to fear from solar and wind because they can't power a whole electric grid. As long as the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, wind and solar can't replace other forms of energy. Hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear energy, and other things that could actually threaten fossil fuel's dominance if they were allowed to thrive, those will never succeed as long as the fossil fuel lobby has influence.
It's also worth noting, as bad as the fossil fuel lobby is, to try to immediately replace fossil fuels with something that is objectively worse would cause great harm to society, and the poor would be hit hardest. Rising energy costs increase the cost of nearly everything. To try to make a drastic overnight shift to renewables as many climate activists push for would kill people. Power outages means food would spoil, and any medicine that needs to be kept cool would expire. People would die, and the rest would be a lot worse off with unreliable access to anything dependent on electricity.
Nuclear is actually a very safe source of energy. The only real danger is political backlash, irrational fear of meltdowns fueled by big oil and coal companies. Renewables unfortunately aren't good for most of the things you listed. Due to their unreliable nature, they can only ever be a supplemental source of power. Germany uses lots of renewables, and it is heavily reliant on importing energy from other countries to cover shortfalls. Renewables (with a few exceptions, hydro and geothermal) are unreliable by nature, and thus can't be used to establish grid stability. They would also greatly increase the cost of energy for the average consumer due to being more expensive than fossil fuels per watt generated.
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Despite it's battlefield effectiveness, the T-34 was in many ways, a flawed vehicle. A controversial statement, I know. They were plagued with reliability issues, and had very few considerations for the crew. Some of these issues that were more down to manufacturing than design might be able to be worked out of the design with an extensive rebuild, but others would not. In addition to that, reverse engineering is not a very simple process, and the more complex the piece of equipment, the more difficult it is to reverse engineer.
As to my first point, yes, the T-34 had above average firepower and protection when it first saw action on the battlefield, and it's mobility was adequate as well. However, its firepower was matched by Germany's own up gunned Panzer IVs (and by American M4s), as well as by the less common Panther and Tiger tanks (which themselves did have reliability issues that plagued their production runs). On terms of mobility, they were really no better or worse than the other premier medium tanks of the war. Only really in armor did they distinguish themselves, being somewhat better protected with sloped frontal armor than the stock Panzer IVs, and having similar levels of frontal protection to the excellent American M4 Shermans. While in these respects, the T-34 could said to have been a very well rounded and strong vehicle, it's non-paper stats are worth considering. It had worse crew accommodations, poor visibility, and terrible gun sights, all of which negatively impacted combat effectiveness. The comfort of the crew is an often overlooked but significant factor in vehicle performance, especially in prolonged engagements. The poor visibility afforded to the crew meant the T-34s were more vulnerable to ambush by infantry attacks, and a T-34's side armor was unexceptional and certainly inadequate against anti-tank weapons such as the Panzerfaust.
I'm not claiming that the T-34 was a bad tank, it was not. In terms of paper stats, among medium tanks it was matched only by the M4s and Panthers, but I think it is worth considering that even an effective weapon system sometimes has very serious flaws that may cause it to be rejected, even if it can be effective on the battlefield. Germany did capture T-34s, and while they did take note of the effectiveness of the sloped armor, they were unimpressed with the build quality, as well as the previously mentioned characteristics. There was little reason for them to spend enormous time and resources switching from their own perfectly adequate medium tank over to a foreign design whose combination of strengths and weaknesses made it a comparable but not strictly superior war machine. And they DID actually adapt aspects of the design onto their own future tanks which they liked, the sloped armor for example being a notable feature in the Panther medium tank, as well as the Tiger 2.
I wrote this prior to watching the bulk of this video, and I'm happy to see we touched on many of the same issues.
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I love the A-10 as much as anyone, but it has its drawbacks. It's electronics are not top notch, and CAS aircraft really should have top notch radar and IFF systems in order to best avoid friendly fire incidents and maximize combat effectiveness. Also, as durable as the A-10 is, it isn't invulnerable to modern SAM systems. For low intensity conflict, drones can perform a similar role at a lower cost. For high danger, high intensity conflict, the A-10 has a huge firepower advantage, but could expect to take heavy losses from surface to air missiles. In the latter role, a small stealth strike aircraft like the F-35 would perform better, since it would be almost invulnerable to anti-aircraft missiles. The A-10 is iconic, and it still has its uses, but its primary role as a tank buster and CAS platform are starting to be taken over by other types of aircraft better adapted to a modern battlefield.
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Yes, the US carriers are larger, better protected, have better force projection capabilities, and are designed to be integrated with all of the latest weapon and defensive systems. yes, the QE is smaller and uses somewhat outdated technologies (non nuclear propulsion and lacks directed energy weapon capabilities,) but Britain doesn't need a whole fleet of massive floating fortresses.
Britain is a smaller nation with powerful allies, and usually refrain from becoming entangled in a large number of wars, and their ship was designed less for projecting huge amounts of force across the globe, and more for defending their interests in a select few high value regions. The reduced range of the non-nuclear propulsion, the smaller aircraft capacity, and the comparatively basic weapon systems are acceptable for a vessel belonging to a country in the UK's position.
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I live in Connecticut, and I can assure you, getting a gun is fucking difficult. You have to take a safety class that costs around $80 and a week of your time. You then take your certificate and go to the local police department. You ask them to take your fingerprints, which most departments only do during certain times of day.
Assuming you get this far, you then spend more money and time to apply for a permit. Getting the permit can take several months, sometimes close to a year, and cost several hundred dollars. This permit must be renewed every 5 years (for a recurring fee of course), missing the renew date forces you to go through the whole process again. Your permit can be taken away at any time and your guns confiscated for any reason, no charges even need to be filed. Your neighbor could be in a bad mood, call the cops, report you and your guns will be seized and destroyed with no charges being pressed or trial of any kind.
To purchase a firearm, you enter a gun store, present your valid ID, present your permit, and wait sometimes upwards of an hour for them to do a full background check on you. If it comes back clean, you can then purchase a firearm and ammunition. A decent quality handgun, rifle or shotgun typically costs at least $400.
Now that you own a gun, you have dozens of different laws to follow regarding the use and storage of it. You can be jailed for keeping it loaded, for failing to lock the gun up, for locking the gun up in the same place as ammunition, for transporting the gun in your car on the way to the range. If someone breaks into your house or car and steals your gun, you will be found guilty of criminal charges for allowing your gun to be stolen. If crimes are committed with that stolen gun, you are likely to face accessory charges for them.
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@vfwh If I have 50k saved up, then the government prints a ton of money, doubling the money supply, my 50k dollars now only has 25k worth of purchasing power. Even if I got a raise and make twice as much money, I'm still out 25k dollars that I had saved up. Inflation is a tax on savings.
The whole point of a commodity backed currency is to tie the value of the currency to a real world item so that there is something more than simple confidence in the currency to keep people's trust in it. It is way harder to create inflation in a commodity backed currency as long as that commodity is very difficult to replicate at scale. For example, gold is finite, so any currency backed by gold at a fixed rate will retain its value forever, or at least so long as it can still be exchanged for gold at the same fixed rate.
To put it very simply, inflation taxes people's savings, devalues debts and messes with the economy in other ways too. These negative effects disproportionately harm the middle class (rich people hold assets which are generally inflation proof, and may even gain value, such as land and stocks), so lowering or eliminating inflation is desirable to maintain a strong middle class with good upwards mobility.
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@blagdaross5953 1. Sure, that's fair. But one shotgun shell has got to be worth at least five pistol rounds in terms of stopping power. There's a reason police use shotguns when going into a potentially dangerous situations, and that's because they trust a shotgun to put down a threat quickly. A shotgun tube has less ammunition than a handgun or rifle magazine, but each round is much more likely to stop the threat assuming you are accurate with your shots.
Buckshot might go through your walls, but the nice thing about shotguns is that you can load them with whatever the hell you want. Less lethals, almost lethal, all the way up to extremely lethal. If you want, you can do something fancy like load the final shell in the tube (thus the first one in the chamber) with rocksalt or birdshot so your first shell probably won't kill an intruder, while also minimizing collateral damage, but have every shell after that be buckshot. It's a very versatile platform, including your ammunition options. You can even put some shell cards on it to solve your limited capacity problem, although to be fair, I think it's a rare situation where 8-ish shotgun shells isn't enough to deal with a home invasion, but at least you have the option.
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@DrWolfensteinz If you wanted to build a home defense shotgun, you could do so for less than $500 and it would be much better suited to the task than a hunting shotgun, and arguably better than the AR depending on your school of thought regarding home defense calibers. You can throw tac lights on a shotgun, you can put cards on it, you can get a shorter barrel, whatever you need. Just because the average hunting shotgun isn't the ideal home defense gun doesn't mean that you can't set up a shotgun specifically for the task. Honestly, I don't see the point of optics on a home defense gun, unless you particularly like red dots. In any case, they absolutely do make shotguns with picatinny rails, so you could have one anyways, although a decent one would double the cost of the build.
You can research all you want about the perfect home defense gun, that's fine. Maybe you can build a $2000 AR into a decent home defense gun. But in terms of cost to effectiveness ratio, shotguns will always have rifles beat. In any case, the best gun in any scenario is the one you have on hand, and that you're familiar with.
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This battle has a lot in common with the Battle off Samar. Both are tales of heroic last stands against overwhelming odds.
In the Battle off Samar, as with this battle, bad Intel and possible incompetence of the command staff led to the allied fleet running into a much larger Japanese fleet completely unprepared. And Captain Ernest E Evans had a lot in common with Captain Waller. He was an inspiration to his crew, and by all accounts, a warrior, who once swore an oath to never back down from a fight. When the Japanese fleet threatened the American landing forces, he ordered his ship, a Fletcher class destroyer (less than half the size of the HMAS Perth) to charge headfirst into the Japanese fleet consisting of 4 battleships, 8 cruisers and 12 destroyers. His ship, the USS Johnston, inflicted incredible damage for its size, sinking a cruiser five times its size with torpedoes, getting into multiple close range gunfights with cruisers and battleships (including the Kongo, a ship twenty times the Johnston's displacement), and finally driving off an entire Japanede destroyer squadron from making a torpedo run on the fleeing US carriers. When the Johnston was finally sunk, it was recorded as being a heavy cruiser by the Japanese. Due to the poor visibility and the immense amount of damage the Johnston managed to inflict, the Japanese thought they were fighting a much larger ship.
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Zelus Amadeus I plan to do something similar. I would like to have a pet (a cat), but cats are relatively low maintenance. I don't plan to travel much, but I can still have fun. There is a paintball field 30 minutes away from where I live, and plenty of hiking trails less than an hour away. I also enjoy video games and movies, which can be enjoyed at home for free or close to it (assuming I put 80 hours into a game I bought for $40, that's 0.50 per hour of fun). Many movies can be streamed for free.
A meal at a restaurant may cost upwards of $20, but I can make a balanced and tasty meal at home for less than $5. I do not plan on having children any time soon, if ever. I am passively searching for a significant other, but I make it clear to anyone who I have been with that children are an expense that I am not ready for yet.
Yes, I know having children is a unique experience that can't be understood by someone who doesn't have them, but not people with children seem strangely ignorant to the fact that some people just do not want them, at least for a while.
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i could make more money off of welfare than i am making with both of my jobs combined right now. i could almost live off of $1000, but i'm not making that much most months unless i get an unusually large number of hours in that time period. if we set the universal basic income at $1000, that plus my shitty minimum wage job, and my slightly less shitty part time job together would give me enough money to pay for rent, electricity, water, food, car insurance, and even save a bit of money over time. as it is now however, i'm unable to afford all of those things at the same time, and have to drive without insurance, and live off of waste food that can't be served to customers for whatever reason.
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One thing about fascism that you never hear about is that it is, in many ways, much closer to communism than it is to capitalism in terms of structure. I'd describe it as socialism wearing the skinsuit of conservatism. There is a hint of right-wing ideology there in the form of nationalism, however, this doesn't really set it apart from socialism since most socialist states are, in practice, actually very nationalist, often to the point of oppressing disliked ethnic groups. Also, for anyone saying that socialism didn't work because there was "too much right wing influence" or "too much nationalism", or whatever, no, just stop. Socialism has never worked at skill, nor will it ever. Being more or less nationalistic doesn't address the core problems with the very idea of socialism, a severe lack of meritocratic incentives for people to work and innovate of their own free will. Yes, fascism and Nazism are derivatives of socialism, and yes, they are every bit as bad as the original.
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@willjapheth23789 The presidential immunity case, as well as the recent case about distinguishing between a "bribe" and a "gratuity" are both very frequently misunderstood, and frequently lied about by the media. I assume they're trying to smear the supreme court because their party doesn't control it.
The presidential immunity case came to the conclusion that everyone would have agreed on in more sane times. The president has immunity to most crimes as long as he commits them in service of his official duty and isn't impeached. That means that if the president drone strikes a hospital full of sick children, you can't criminally charge him unless he's impeached first. If he shoots someone dead in the street, he doesn't have immunity because that was regular murder, not legally immune government murder. Murder is only okay when the government does it. That's how the law has always worked, and that's what the supreme court ruled. Without this immunity for official acts, every single president in my lifetime would be a war criminal several times over.
The reason I made that assumption is because most gun owners, or at least the politically aware ones, are aware of how aggressively federal agencies like the ATF have been abusing Chevron Deference to basically make up new laws as if they were the legislature. The court is supposed to interpret laws, that's it's purpose. The enforcement agencies are supposed to enforce the laws as they are interpreted, not decide to come up with a bone headed interpretation of it that turns entire industries on their head or turns millions of people into felons without due process.
Our system worked well once upon a time, but everything's been so heavily politicized that both sides see any agency that isn't owned by them as "rouge" and "dangerous". Everyone's in a mad grab for power, and it's not going to end well for the common citizen.
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well, this video isn't wrong, but i don't really like how it's presented. your wait staff isn't some greedy goblin trying to take all of your money, they're some poor sucker trying to make a living off of table scraps. i know this from experience. i've seen pretty waitresses make four times what i did on any given day.
my hourly wage of $2.30 was cut in half by the restaurant taking my meals out of my paycheck, regardless if i ever ate there. now, making less than two dollars per hour, i would make between $30 and $40 in tips on a 10 hour shift. this is the same restaurant that refused to let me work more than 4 days per week, but would call me in randomly to cover other shifts, preventing me from picking up an additional job.
as for cooks not being tipped... i would agree with that being wrong, except that NOT having to live off of tips is a godsend. cooks get an actual living wage, or at least closer to one than any wait staff.
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@dcterr1 Fascism, National Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism, Corporatism, no socialist ideology has ever been good. The fundamental problem with socialism is that it puts absolute or near-absolute power into the hands of the unaccountable state. It is a totalitarian ideology by it's very nature.
"Scandinavian socialism" is not true socialism, it is a mixed economy. It combines some aspects of capitalism and some of socialism. It's much worse than pure capitalism, but not quite as bad as pure socialism. The US is just as deeply into socialism as the Scandinavian countries, the government just prioritizes fighting countless proxy wars instead of providing free health care for it's citizens. We have few modern working examples of capitalism in the world today. Capitalism, as an economic model, has already been abandoned in favor of socialism. Socialism, and eventually totalitarianism is the inevitable conclusion of democracy.
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They were arguably no less reliable than most of the Soviet tanks. The transmissions were overtaxed, and a good driver was required to reduce wear on them, but the Russian tanks, especially the KV and IS series tanks had numerous issues with unreliable transmissions, very short lived engines, sub-par armor quality, poorly made ammunition, gun barrels and optics, cramped interiors...
Germany's late war tanks such as the Panther and Tiger II did not undergo sufficient testing, they were over-engineered and unreliable. By comparison, their early and mid war designs such as the Panzers II through IV, and the Tiger I were excellent vehicles, well designed and built. Their armor quality was the best in the world (although only about on par with the sloped armor of US and Soviet tanks) and their guns and sights were superior to anything else as well. The Tiger was, contrary to popular belief, actually quite reliable and fuel efficient by the standards of heavy tanks. Only top notch vehicles like the M4 Sherman were more reliable, and the Tiger only consumed around 40% more fuel than a M4 or T34, and actually slightly less than a KV1. The Tiger was one of the best tanks of the war, its only real limiting factor was that they were slower to build and consumed more resources than medium tanks, thus could only be deployed in limited numbers.
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Honestly, as influential as it was, I'd consider the T-34 to be a worse tank than the M4 or the Pz4 by a fair margin. They were shoddily made, extremely unreliable, over crowded their crew, had very poor visibility (a serious issue for tanks), and were so cramped that the casualty rate in knocked out T-34s was nearly double that of the tanks of other nations of the war, because crews struggled to exit their vehicles when it went up in flames.
Some elements of the T-34 were innovative and effective. Their frontal sloped armor plate gave them armor protection rivaling that of the American M4 Sherman, and their low profile made them smaller targets. But they still had a great many issues which, combined with far inferior tactics, made them much less effective than comparable German tanks.
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Most gamers are men. I actually wish there were more women who were gamers, but mostly there aren't. Mobile free to play games aimed at casual audiences are not real games, they're time wasters. There are a handful of decent mobile games, but they're buried under a mountain of time and cash grabbing garbage.
When you say that 40% of gamers are women, you can't then say that it's men's fault for gatekeeping because 90% of Mechwarrior 5 or Dirt 3 players are men, because you're using different definitions. These are AAA titles made and marketed with a very different demographic in mind than a match 3 mobile game. I WANT there to be more women who enjoy the kinds of games I enjoy, nobody is gatekeeping anything. At most, you might have some fans being wary of their hobbies being watered down to appeal to a wider audience, but that isn't exclusive to race, gender, etc. But can also include simplifying game mechanics and such.
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intelligent life itself is an over-complicated von-neuman machine with an annoying tendency to get sidetracked
we should be using the resources in our solar system (the asteroid belt is a good first stop since we don't have to pull the materials from a gravity well first) to build a dyson sphere, which would be used to harvest the sun for it's metals and fuseable materials. we should then start launching nuclear pulse drive powered space craft (several orders of magnitude faster than any modern spacecraft and buildable with modern technology) to explore and colonize other star systems, and do the same to those stars.
within somewhere between 100,000 years and 1,000,000 years, we could have colonized the majority of the galaxy, with most of humanity (and it's descendants,) living in dyson sphere colony stations with spin gravity.
we could start on the first steps of this project today, with modern technology. the problem is that there is not enough interest in the long term future of humanity, and too much fear and distrust of technology and futurism.
the vast majority of people spend more time on t.v. shows, gossip and non-constructive small talk (mostly via social media) rather than productive work that may one day help humanity's future. the few who do dedicate their lives to the betterment of humanity often have skewed ideas of what an ideal humanity is, and form into extremist groups.
most people have little interest in technology and futurism, and an inherent distrust and fear of such technologies as "active support structures" and "nuclear pulse drives," and this is assuming that they have even heard of such technology in the first place, which is rare.
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I live in Connecticut, and I can assure you, getting a gun is fucking difficult. You have to take a safety class that costs around $80 and a week of your time. You then take your certificate and go to the local police department. You ask them to take your fingerprints, which most departments only do during certain times of day.
Assuming you get this far, you then spend more money and time to apply for a permit. Getting the permit can take several months, sometimes close to a year, and cost several hundred dollars. This permit must be renewed every 5 years (for a recurring fee of course), missing the renew date forces you to go through the whole process again. Your permit can be taken away at any time and your guns confiscated for any reason, no charges even need to be filed. Your neighbor could be in a bad mood, call the cops, report you and your guns will be seized and destroyed with no charges being pressed or trial of any kind.
To purchase a firearm, you enter a gun store, present your valid ID, present your permit, and wait sometimes upwards of an hour for them to do a full background check on you. If it comes back clean, you can then purchase a firearm and ammunition. A decent quality handgun, rifle or shotgun typically costs at least $400.
Now that you own a gun, you have dozens of different laws to follow regarding the use and storage of it. You can be jailed for keeping it loaded, for failing to lock the gun up, for locking the gun up in the same place as ammunition, for transporting the gun in your car on the way to the range. If someone breaks into your house or car and steals your gun, you will be found guilty of criminal charges for allowing your gun to be stolen. If crimes are committed with that stolen gun, you are likely to face accessory charges for them.
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intelligence doesn't mean a damn thing. success is completely a different thing, and people of complicated thoughts are rarely interesting to or interested in conversing with others focused on more... trivial... things. intelligence does not make me superior to others, just different from them. our accomplishments distinguish us, and i have few of note.
1. yeah, i'm pretty open to new ideas, but am also cautious about them unless i have heard them from multiple sources
2. checks clock shit... 6.36 AM
3. i love, LOVE to talk with people who don't start conversations with remarks about the weather or how my day has been
4. actually i quite like to vomit out words, and am actually somewhat adapt at simplifying grand concepts sufficiently to be understood by most
5. i haven't had a haircut in 4 months, and away from work wear cheap shorts and t-shirts almost exclusively. i spend little time on my appearence
6. i love learning about the systems behind things that most people don't question
7. bad with directions, can't remember names, have locked my keys in my truck no less than 4 times in 6 months
8. this is related to #1, i'm open to new ideas, and that includes the idea that my idea might not be the only valid one
9. only if it's something that i enjoy. i lack focus on things i find boring and trivial such as work, meals and... eh, i'm too lazy to think of a third. arguably that's because i'm still focused on the things i want to focus on.
10. really? i've heard that most geniuses are cynics, and i thought myself in the minority for being genuinely happy despite expecting and preparing for everything to go wrong.
woo, this was less of a waste of my time than that personality test i keep telling myself...
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metro 2033 where you have the poorly voice acted little snot hanging from your back, slowing your aiming, disabling sprint and jump, and also you have to navigate a confusing maze of wrecked building, fire, tripwire traps and insta death pits. this maze is also absolutely filled with the fastest, flankiest, most annoying pack hunting melee enemy in the game, fought in this extreme close quarters combat maze of a level.
if that's not bad enough, the ammunition that can be scavenged here is scarcer than most other parts of the game, bad news when facing a nearly endless supply of fast moving, dodgy melee enemies that tend to encourage panicked spraying and praying. also, if you run out of ammo for all your weapons, good luck, because these ultra fast enemies who can kill you in 3 hits are nearly impossible to hit with one of your own melee attacks thanks to their small size. i swear the little buggers are psychic and know to wait exactly until i'm reloading to bumrush me, not at all helped by the annoying kid hanging from my back, slowing me down as i desperately backpedal away from the mutant dog bastard while hammering the reload button, more often than not straight into an insta death hole in the ground.
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The US armed forces are kind of ridiculous. Even the standard units have superior training and equipment to many of the world's special forces units, while also maintaining the largest navy, air force and army by far. (Technically, there are larger armies in pure manpower, but this is a poor indicator of overall strength.) The US has a huge number of special forces units, with the marines arguably being the largest and best equipped special forces unit in the world, overshadowing many nation's entire militaries all on it's own. I won't claim that there aren't some other very, very highly trained and elite units from other nations, because there very definitely is, but the US military being compared to the rest of the world is still something like putting the Imperium of Man (Wh-40k) into the star wars universe. Nobody else even comes close on quantity, and few approach the same level of quality either.
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@Llortnerof More expensive, yes, worse, no. The quality of care is generally as good or better than anything in Europe, with some exceptions. Sometimes new drugs don't get approved due to corruption/ enforced monopoly for a competing, inferior drug.
American health care is extremely expensive due to, frankly, corruption and lobbying of the medical industry. The US health care system is what is called a "public private partnership" which is a nice sounding way of saying the government enforces a monopoly of the industry on behalf of "private" companies.
This system has the superficial appearance of a capitalist system since private companies are the primary forces behind it, but in reality, it is much closer to the psudeo socialist system used by the armband enthusiasts and bad spaghetti man from the world war sequel. The corporations are private in name only, they are basically extensions of the state in every way that matters.
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Let's try to avoid this scenario. If it did happen, the cities would starve. You can't win a war without food. Cities don't produce anything. They're hubs of administration, culture, and some limited industry. Industry exists outside of cities, while administration and culture doesn't win wars. Also, city people are weak. They'll be at each other's throats within a week of the food running out. People who live in cities don't understand supply chains, they don't understand why the markets are empty, but they'll be desperate, hungry and angry. Oh yeah, and the only people in cities with guns are cops and criminals. Country folk are armed, and they know how to shoot. Most just want to be left alone, but if a bunch of bandits from the cities try stealing their land or food, they will happily form militias to defend their property.
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@rebeccareisman1435 You're the only teacher I've talked to who doesn't viciously attack the idea of charter and private schools existing. I'm curious to hear your position on things as an educator.
My position is that the public schools are largely corrupt, and that teacher's unions contribute to this corruption. I think that school choice is a very good thing for parents families. I've been called anti-teacher before, which I guess is fair. I think it should be easier to fire a bad teacher than it is to excommunicate a priest. If you put the needs of the student against the needs of the teacher, I'll side with the student. A public servant's role should be to serve the public, and if they can't perform, someone else should do it.
I know charters aren't perfect, and the one I went to wasn't fun, but it was effective. If you have two ships, a big one full of holes representing public education, and a smaller, mostly intact one representing charter/ private/ other third option, the solution to save the most people isn't to blow up the smaller ship and force everyone to stay on the sinking ship that is public education. Sure, maybe you could try to patch the holes and fight off the horde of zombies (teachers unions) trying to bite anyone attempting to fix the system. But the solution certainly isn't to sink the other ship. Do you think school choice is a net benefit, and what is your position on teacher's unions?
This may sound conspiratorial (because it is, I'm a conspiracy theorist), but I would claim that there is a war on merit being fought. There seems to be some groups actively trying to sabotage successful people, including students. Sometimes this is under the guise of not making the less successful feel bad about themselves. It's not limited to students, and sometimes weird racial elements are brought into it. I see people claiming things like "showing up on time is a trait of whitenes" or "literacy is a white person thing." I'd say the people saying it were white supremacists except they are explicitly anti-white in their rhetoric. Still, telling black people that being good at math is a "white thing" can't be good for them either. This is not just a race thing, it seems to be part of a much, much larger war against merit.
There was the perhaps initially well intentioned "No Child Left Behind" act which sabotaged entire classes to benefit the slowest learners in the class. The war against school choice itself could even be seen as a form of anti-meritocracy, blocking an effort to have some form of alternative to failing public schools. Maybe I'm seeing connections where there are none, and I'm not about to start ranting about space lasers, but it seems really strange to me how little we seem to care about celebrating success these days. When I hear boomers call my generation the "participation trophy generation", I think maybe they had a point. I don't know, do you have any insight on this stuff? It's been half a decade since I've been in school, so all of my up to date info is second hand.
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@LBart218 I was considering DeSantis, but I'm not confident he won't stab us in the back the instant he gets into office. Although to be fair, Trump didn't build the wall which was one of the biggest things he ran on. Both have done authoritarian stuff I don't approve of (banning bump stocks, going after Julian Assange, and some of Ron Paul's anti-woke policies went a little too far IMO.) Trump is the known evil, and he is, as far as we know, the least bad choice.
Maybe DeSantis would be better, but I'm not willing to take that risk. I haven't seen a Democrat I'd even consider voting for in years. The most likely Dems to run should all be rotting in jail for one reason or another. Killing a bunch of old people in nursing homes, arming terrorist groups, taking bribes from foreign powers, etc. Some Republicans have done the same, but the fact that 4 years of Russiagate has turned up nothing means that Trump must be pretty clean.
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@giin97 I remember the Killzone games, the enemy faction (Helghast) are very heavily visually influenced by the armband enthusiasts, yet from a narrative perspective, they absolutely have the moral high ground. In practically every conflict in that series, it's "Space America" which is the aggressor. Okay, the Helghast commit war crimes, but the "good guys" of the series also VERY do that, culminating in the near total ecological destruction of Helghan, killing millions of civilians and forcing them to flee off world. It's one of the extremely rare points in the series where the narrative pauses the "America, F yeah" energy to go "wait a minute, this is actually pretty messed up."
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@Cherryripe25 Yeah, porn can cause that. I have low confidence, and I can't blame that on porn. Lack of confidence, depression, mental disorders, addiction... you can blame them to outside factors which may indeed contribute to them, but the core issues lie with one's self.
I just don't like that some people want to ban everything that could be considered addictive or dangerous. Not everyone wants to, but some people use other people's struggle with insert issue here to call for increase regulation or the outright banning of an item/ activity.
I can see how porn would create certain expectations for women of course, but I don't think the expectations being creative are any less potentially harmful to men. We need to recognize that porn is, essentially, fiction. Sex doesn't work the way it does in porn, and not enough people realize that.
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@rebeccathuesen3587 Different places have different cultures. People in cities may never have seen a gun before, and be irrationally afraid of them. People who live in rural, or even suburban areas might trust their neighbors more and have little tolerance for crime that is a part of the daily life of a city person. I've lived in different areas before, and you really can't judge how people will react unless you're familiar with the people, and their culture.
Personally, I don't tolerate petty crime. I have very little respect for someone who would steal from someone else's house. But I'm a gun owner, I know other gun owners, and I recognize that the vast majority of us are responsible people who respect each other and our property. In some places, everyone has a sign that says "tresspassers will be shot" and yet shootings (and crime) are extremely rare because everybody respects one another's boundaries. It's a different culture, and honestly, despite appearances, actually a safer one.
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@bhough410 I agree it's bad that he spent more money, but we did have a booming economy, which kind of canceled out. Yes, the national debt did rise, but that's true of almost every administration. Trump repealed the fine for not having Obama care which is a plus. Yes, I'd love to have seen him repeal it, but honestly, I don't think that's likely to happen ever. Frankly, our society is a spoiled one, and they expect free handouts.
I don't think his decisions had much to do with asset forfeiture. I could be wrong, but typically that is something that takes place on a more local level. Make no mistake, I don't love the guy, but I think he was a lot less bad than Hillary or Biden.
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JoJo Iron his entire character, and indeed, the entire anime, is based off of the fact that being incredibly powerful is incredibly boring and pointless. the show itself is a deconstruction of the fact that so many action animes have characters that have no set limits. Saitama himself is a living, breathing, no limits fallacy who exists solely to win every fight he's ever been in without even having to try.
to hold Saitama to the same rules as any other anime protagonist is to completely miss the point. however, if you really must insist on comparing his strength directly to another character, the most powerful character we've seen him defeat is Boros. I'd rate Boros's power to be comparable to that of super saiyan 3, as he is capable of at least one planet busting attack. Saitama, as usual, was holding back in this fight. His serious punch, the final move he used to defeat Boros in a single blow while also canceling out his planet busting energy attack, was the absolute minimum of how strong he is. If we're being fair, even his serious punch was likely not his full strength. still, he is not only capable of delivering planet busting attacks, he is capable of surviving a direct hit from such an attack with absolutely no sign of injury whatsoever. that alone puts him well past most dragon ball characters, although I haven't seen the entire series, so I can't be sure about anything really. But I know that Goku is more about pushing his limits rather than not having any to begin with.
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Probably gonna catch some flak for this. I think that climate change science is a lot less reliable and more politically influenced than most others, and is inheriantly less trustworthy because of it. I don't deny that climate change is happening, practically every scientist agrees that it is, where things get a bit less clear cut is when you try to get exact numbers for how much of an impact humans are having on it.
Most scientists don't comment on whether humans are having an effect on the Earth's climate or not. The "95% of scientists say humans are causing climate change" claims are an outright lie, completely ommiting the majority of those who don't comment on that.
That alone is not enough to invalidate the claim of humans impacting the climate as there are still more scientists believing we are than aren't, but it does go to show how political agendas can impact either scientific studies or their presentation, something that has become all too common these days.
I believe humans are having some impact on our climate, there appears to be much more evidence in favor of that than otherwise. The real issue is we have very little idea how much of an impact we are having. It is very difficult to find solid, non-contradicting numbers because the climate change models are so complicated, and contain so many unknown variables.
I'm not denying that humans are speeding up climate change, we almost certainly are. But those claiming that global warming will be as apolocolypyic as a giant asteroid or a solar flare don't seem very helpful or believable when the claims are based on cherry picked data from outlying studies, when many more studies suggest a slower or more mild effect over the same time scale. It's borderline anti-vax logic. Choosing one outlying study over many more that have much milder results.
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@gustschina7558 I won't say that AI is a non-factor, it absolutely doesn't help the situation. However, there's another reason many people are unemployable. A lot of college graduates have completely useless degrees for fields which are over-saturated with workers, or which have very few career opportunities. This is compounded by the fact that they need to make more than non-degree holders to pay off their debt, meaning they demand higher salaries despite having no useful skills and no workplace experience.
I don't blame these kids, not really. They were lied to, told that they'd have a job lined up for them once they got their degree. They didn't realize how bad a situation they would be putting themselves in by going 40k into debt for a piece of paper, because their entire high school experience was teachers and staff telling them they needed to do that to succeed. But now it creates not just a crisis for these poor kids, it also creates an entire generation of debt slaves who are virtually unemployable, refuse to take entry level jobs, and have no work experience to get a better job. And if these kids have their way, I'll be paying their debt for them via taxes.
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knoahbody69 That's... kind of a strange comparison to draw, but I suppose it works. An arrow fired from a longbow may have a fair chance of penetrating poor quality armor plate, the same as an ATGM or RPG may damage or disable a modern MBT, depending on the hit location. Even if an outright kill isn't guaranteed, multiple non-penetrating impacts from missile weaponry is likely to damage the vehicle (or man at arms).
I'll admit, I'm not very familiar with middle ages battles, but yes, armor vs. firepower in some respects pre-dates even gunpowder weaponry. Swords and axes may struggle against plate and chain armor, but a spear may, like an AP round, pierce through thinner armor through kinetic force, and a warhammer may damage the armor's wearer without penetrating through sheer force of impact, not unlike a HESH or high explosive round.
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