Artists don’t have to throw away digital media, just they are adapting with process videos and live streams. A real proof of life sorta deal since AI is holding their craft hostage.

I wish Nancy Pelosi only the best in private life, but let this be the final time we utter her name.

She’s full of crap with her argument about people leaving blue states, but I do have a lingering fear people will burn out before 2026 when it matters a little more. Wins better give us momentum and not complacency.

The Florida version of the Straw Hat pirates. They all have guns, Chopper is an alligator, and Nami is inexplicably pregnant for some reason.

You basically described the economic concept of consumer surplus. When a product is entirely dependent on the price a consumer is willing to pay because the supply is infinite, the natural result is… this.

Except they shouldn’t be price discriminating; it’s easier and more effective to just offer tiered pricing structures (e.g. collectors editions) and eventual sales (e.g. 50% off after a year) to hit people at different places on the supposed consumer surplus curve. As you note, the undermines your confidence in the prices but you’re likely a little lower on the curve compared to the “must have on day one” crowd.

That said, the whole theory also explains why freemium is so attractive. When there’s no price minimum, the optimal price is 0 and you work your way up with features and perks (while also raising the price people are willing to pay by getting them hooked). It’s all nasty business, lol

Guy looks like a GTA player RPing a hillbilly meth head.

Ah yes, I love faith-based AI technology. The slop is real so long as you believe! /s

Seriously are these people who think your prayers are the reason your phone stays on 1% battery for an hour longer than you thought?

Oh no, Trump’s gonna enact more tariffs in retribution isn’t he.

Yes. But for every $1 they spend on ICE, they… generate… oh no, no produce is getting picked, construction is stagnant… (Seriously if we ran similar metrics on GoP crap we could probably say we lose ADDITIONAL $s per $…)

Well… Yes, but let’s not forget he’d still get hamstrung by his own Congress even with Dems in power. They wouldn’t even pass Biden’s milquetoast agenda. Your fantasy needs to involve a populous that actually understands that Congress primaries matter, which is even more farfetched, unfortunately.

I meant it as a joke, though not gonna lie I wouldn’t mind seeing AOC vs MTG. Though knowing the Dems, it’ll be a Hillary or Kamala reboot and… Ugh, we’ll be saying President Greene in 2029.

I’d vote for her (in their primary to make it easier to elect a better Dem)!

Mumble was… fine. My friends actually moved to Discord from Mumble for our MMO stuff but that was primarily because it was easier to invite randos to the chat. That quality makes it almost impossible to break away from atm.

I recall the latency being only a little worse than Discord, but I think that’s because a friend set up the server at his work as a side thing (he also hosted Minecraft and Terraria). It’s not too complex to setup, but your quality will depend a lot on the computer and network you’re running. At least, it did for us, back in the day.

We’ve thought about alternatives to Discord. Old names were Ventrilo and TeamSpeak but they’re just not very modern. Plus, now almost every chat app has voice, too. Just, for features, it’s hard to beat Discord at this… though I’m willing to read the other comments to get for ideas, too. Lol

It also went up from earlier polls after the Trump endorsement, which helped minimize the impact of the actual GOP runner Silva.

Bigotry is certainly a strong sell to a large chunk of voters, but hell I think the red scare bullshit was probably even stronger. It’s wild how many people are still capitalist brainwashed and have no idea that socialism isn’t communism (or that either isn’t inherently bad somehow).

Kat’s an underdog contender in the same way Zohran was; I wouldn’t count her out so handedly. She’s paying attention to how to run a primary campaign and her opponents (who admittedly are more established) likely won’t have as much energy. Admittedly, they aren’t Cuemo levels of disliked, though.

Simply the fact that anyone is talking about a house seat now outside of IL-9 says much, though. Personally, while I enjoy her journalism and like her stance, what I’m more curious about is her connections to The Onion through her partner, uh… Tim Onion (I forget his name, but he’s a chaotic progressive rich guy who bought it recently). Will it make for a more impactful campaign? She obviously can’t make it into a joke run but they must have some very creative and interesting people on their side, not to mention some private money to counter corporate interests.

If it makes you feel better, I’ve noticed a lot, lot more private security in the uber-rich neighborhood I have to pass to get to work.

They’re scared.

Well they need someone there; if you just exile people to hell without a plan you end up with Australia.

I’m with a lot of Californians reluctantly voting on Prop 50. It’s a backslide for democracy but when the whole county is avalanche levels of backsliding, it seems unavoidable. At least the language emphasizes temporary (though it still has lasting impacts as it messes up incumbent advantage, not that I like that either).

I just wish Gavin wasn’t growing in popularity as he has been over these moves, he’s such a smug rich asshole kind of lib. We need what NYCs been getting with progressive minded folks.

I’d take it with a big grain of salt — it’s Forbes, they lube up people with money with pretty weak arguments. He is a billionaire, but mostly through overvaluation of the company he’s ultimately gutting for profit. (Although if it died, he is still rich, unfortunately, just not a billionaire).

Some of the arguments being made in the article though, like it being an “authentic place” and having more traffic is a little misleading. For AI, we already know 50% of the Internet is AI made now, in a remarkably short amount of time and a hefty amount of that is going to be on Reddit. If the 90% by 2026 prediction holds true, he’s basically an owner of a gold mine that’s already tapped out. Users won’t necessarily catch on, but they will be drowned out as a source of LLM data.

Admittedly, the traffic increase isn’t all bots but to classify it as organic is misleading too- iirc, they have a deal with Google to push reddit in exchange for Gemini training. Even unrelated searches are propping up Reddit as the first result; it’s like using SEO cheats. As with the poisoning of his data with artificial data, that deal may not last (and if the AI bubble bursts, that’s certainly gone).

Frankly, we need the bubble to burst but we also need heavy regulation on these industries. I’m not too hopeful of the latter and the former isn’t going to be pretty— it’s not like the .com bubble made the 90s a better era, for instance.

Y’know, I want to dismiss Americans being dumb, and they are, but thinking a little deeper about my own neighborhood and it might feel like there’s more crime because… surprise, there’s more homeless or struggling financially. Things very much look worse outside, although it’s somehow not understood that cities often provide care to the poor which reduces crime.

Admittedly, a majority of those ignorant people also just… never visit a city and get all their news via propaganda, but I wonder if their small towns also have increased poverty without the safeguards we have in the city, resulting in increases in crime. Wouldn’t be the first time the right projected their problems onto the rest of us.