The founding fathers never anticipated such dick-headery

George Washington was the richest man in the New World at the time of his Presidency. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay weren’t far behind. And quite a few of them (particularly the Federalists) were notorious for the wealth they accrued on currency and commodity speculation. That was one of the sticking points of the First National Bank. Whomever controlled it could effectively finance scams and flim-flams at a rate unheard of prior to the institution of modern banking.

Go ahead and sell books you’ve never read nevermind haven’t written, and memecoins to dumb twats after you are out if you want, but this shit can’t happen in active office.

This is the whole reason people seek active office. Politics is just another avenue of celebrity, with the bonus of influencing policy in such a way that you can direct public spending into private pockets. This is the latest means of doing so. But its an age old tradition, older than the nation itself.

Idk about the sole point. Lots of people speculated on them believing there wouldn’t be a rug pull within hours of the coin’s official launch. Crypto is the new Box of Rocks. All advertisement, no substance.

I think you’d be surprised to discover how many people speak English as a second language, thanks to its extensive use in business and law. Even (perhaps especially) in China, where US-Chinese trade relations have been going strong since Nixon shook hands with Mao.

Only in the last ten years has the relationship between Wall Street and Hong Kong/Shanghai degraded and the appeal of English as a business language fallen by the wayside.

Been happening for a lot longer than we like to admit. Students coming to the US for education and then returning home to work have been the norm since the early '00s, on account of the US higher education system being highly subsidized by the States and Feds. This made US education relatively cheap for its quality, especially at the state university level.

But that was good, actually, because we became a nexus of research and development. Lots of students came, got education, and left. Lots more stayed around, lured by the high paying jobs at domestic firms. A few even joined the education staff of the universities themselves. A bit of brain drain was fine, so long as we produced far more than we lost.

Now we’re just hemorrhaging talent and expertise because we no longer value the work product of the professional classes. We’re pricing people out of public universities and imposing strict ideological tests on the students we do let in. We’re going full eugenics mode on senior staff and administration. And we’re turning education more and more into a means of profiting off credentialing than accruing working knowledge or performing independent research.

America is dismantling all of its socialist institutions.

Like many industry observers accurately stated that the shortages will subside long before any of the CHIPS spending could even possibly make a difference.

If you consider advanced microprocessors a strategic asset, the immediate short-term pinch in supply isn’t the problem. Its the long-term overseas outsourcing of production to regions we consider at high risk of foreign conflicts (Taiwan and South Korea). Simply moving finished chips across the Pacific Ocean is its own strategic problem.

One could easily argue that our steadily ratcheted hostilities toward China, Russia, and Iran is the actual root cause of our problems. And we’d do well to in-source production for supply flow reasons, but our real panacea might be to simply stop fucking around at the periphery of a rival imperial power.

But if you consider the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian peoples as inherently adversarial to the American way of life (on account of them hating us for our freedoms), then relying on Samsung and TMSC as your primary supply of chipsets seems imprudent.

Of course, if you wanted to give the economy any hope for viable electronics while also massively screwing over imports, this would have been your shot. So it seems strategically at odds with the whole “make domestic manufucating happen” rhetoric.

A big central problem of the US chips strategy is that we’re not building capacity, we’re building investment incentives. The goal is to make local manufacturing profitable rather than productive. But that’s at the root of the ideological divide between American and the BRICS we’re positioning ourselves in opposition to.

We wouldn’t be threatening war with these countries if we had a strong global socio-economic consensus.

Define ‘violent.’

No. You will simply receive a warning if we don’t like your activity on the site.

Really, what are you doing interacting with this website to begin with? Stop posting. Stop commenting. Stop voting.

Just. Consume. The. Content.

We need your eyeballs for the ads. Everything else is driving up our costs.

The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.

BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.

Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.

Tech itself is not the issue. How it’s applied is the issue.

At this point, I would argue that technology is the issue. Or, at least, the current iteration of it.

Internal Combustion Engines, always-on internet connections, and digital financial systems are generating real physical hazards that stretch beyond their benefits. This isn’t just an issue of use. There is no “proper” method of employing - for instance - cryptocurrency or single-use plastics or a statewide surveillance network that doesn’t result in a degradation of quality of life for the population at large. To take a more dramatic angle, there’s no safe application of a nuclear bomb.

When the iEye app notifies you that the enzyme is running low, simply crack open an ice cold, refreshing can of Tesla Cola Zero to refuel your device for another two hours. Need to sleep? We got you.

Except this isn’t a technological innovation, its a Science Fantasy. iEye isn’t a real thing. Tesla Cola Zero isn’t a real thing. Not needing sleep isn’t a real thing. You’re not a cyborg and you will never be a cyborg.

But the science fantasy is still having its own cost. People are making real material nationally-transformative (or de-transformative) decisions based on the fantastic promises we’ve been sold about Tomorrow. We’re underdeveloping our mass transit infrastructure and relying entirely too much on unregulated air travel to speed up travel. At the same time, we’re clinging to old bunker-fuel laden container ships and decimating the aquatic ecology, because we refuse to adapt proven nuclear powered shipping that’s over 60 years old at this point. We’re investing more and more and more money in digital surveillance and personal tracking. We’re off-loading our ability to collect and process information to unreliable digital tools (LLMs being only the latest in overhyped AI as a replacement for professionalized human labor). And then we’re trying to justify the bad decisions we make as a result by claiming secret wisdom inherent in machines.

We’re eating our seed corn after being told technologists will eliminate our need to eat ever again.

This is a direct result of technological developments we have made (or promised to make and failed to deliver) over the last twenty years. Revolutions in racial profiling, viral marketing, planned obsolescence, military expansionism, and genocide have not improved our quality of life in any material sense.

The cow has not benefited from industrial agriculture. And the prole has not benefited from de-skilling of labor.

Balatro is a Poker Game in the same way that Gin and Bridge and 52 Pickup are Poker games.