The railroad system is so safe y’all. Trust us. It’s the workers fault and the consumers fault if anything is broken or neglected. We’re entirely without fault!!
Big problem here is that the freight railroads are all being run like vulture capital operations. They own the trackage, so it’s their responsibility to maintain it, and it’s not like they don’t have the money. Norfolk Southern’s profits (not revenue, this is after costs) Sept 30 2022- Sept 30 2023 were over 8 billion dollars. Union Pacific did $14 billion in 2022. They can afford to maintain their shit, but they’re not; they’re just letting their tracks and rolling stock go to hell and shrugging when it blows up. Just flat out not paying your cost centers is not a thing a sane business does if it wants to keep doing business for long. I’m convinced that the major rail carriers long-term plan is to just not pay to repair a goddamn thing until the rail infra is completely broken, declare bankruptcy, and then sell it to the government. The government will make CONRAIL 2 (see: CONRAIL, which is what happened the last time they pulled this shit), spend an ass-ton of taxpayer dollars fixing this bullshit, and then sell it back to the privates for pennies on the dollar because of FrEe MaRkEt EfFiCiEnCy.
In America, socialism is something you only get once you become a powerful enough capitalist enterprise. The state produces the means of production and then just hands it over to you while you collect profits. Another great example of this is the thousands of miles of dark fiber optic cable buried in the US that ISPs refuse to connect at the “last mile.” Why spend a bunch of money giving everybody fiber when they’re already paying you a kidney every month for shitty rural DSL?
I got to spend a couple of days at a sci-fi convention at a table next to Richard Hatch of the 1970s Battlestar Galactica fame. He was a really cool guy and we spent all day joking around. Every so often, someone would come by and say, “hey! You’re uh… uh…” and I would say, “he’s Dirk Benedict.” (That was his BSG co-star). Once I told a lady that she better not call him Dirk Benedict because it makes him really mad.
If I had a photo of Dirk Benedict, I would have asked him to sign it.
Sadly, Richard Hatch is no longer with us. I really enjoyed hanging out with him. He was way into tabletop gaming and even would leave the table sometimes to host a session. I’m not a huge TTGer anymore, but I wish I could have had Richard Hatch as a GM.
I’ve had a lot of cool experiences meeting people in the sci-fi/fantasy world by working tables at sci-fi cons due to two different reasons about ten years apart, but that era of my life is over. I can only go as a regular conventioneer now. I take my daughter to them on occasion if one is nearby because she likes to look at all the cosplay.
I also got to see Gwar and The Misfits do a free double-act concert late at night at DragonCon in the 90s, which topped most of the notable people I met, even though my experience with pretty much all of them was good.
As a kid I couldn’t eat that. I still have problems with this. I tried buying dino nuggets a while back and my spouse had to eat them in the end. Which is especially absurd considering that the animal shape throws me off of eating an actual animal. But I’ve worked my way through to be able to eat gummibears and sometimes even chocolate santas, but I have to eat them immediately and not let their headless carcass lie around. (Bunnies are worse.)
I guess so. I had to convince myself that gummi bears are in great pain and the only thing that helps them is to be chewed on, like a massage kinda thing. That’s the only way I can eat gummi bears. I am in my 30s man.
was it a car crash video/gif sub? sounds familiar.
I also remember a dank meme with a sketch of jesus and a helicopter pilot, with different dumb captions, like “hit this bong before you takeoff, bro, trust me, my son”
Extraordinarily unlikely, except in the fantasies of some Russians. If Trump wins, we wouldn’t get violent until he actually tried to suspend the Constitution, that would be the most likely instigating event. Not people voting for him and him winning, sadly, fair and square by the laws of our land.
The die-hard Trump supporters are too few in number to do anything if Biden wins. Civil war-wise anyway, they could probably manage a bunch of terrorist attacks if they were angry enough.
People need to organize now, not just to prep for violence but to ensure there’s some kind of social safety net to fall back on when shit hits the fan.
He lost the popular vote in his first election and it was just decided that he would get to play President anyway. I don’t know how much any of these people are going to care about what the voters want this time around…
The die-hard Trump supporters are too few in number to do anything
That’s not how civil war happens. What would happen is that elections results would be put in question (for example some states would challenge the results and there would be disagreement among legal experts as to what to do next), both candidates would start issuing orders and different parts of the military would start obeying different candidates. You weren’t that far away from this last time. Fortunately for you the military chain of command wasn’t compromised but the government was absolutely ready to abandon the democratic process and split. All that was needed was for Pence to commit to the plan.
Civil wars can happen in a lot of different ways, it’s any set of circumstances that leads large swaths of a country to fight other large swaths of it.
I enjoyed the first couple books. The next few were okay, although all the misogyny and rape and torture fetishizing was bothering me. The Temple of the Winds was unintelligible nonsense. I had to stop in disgust and never touch another one of his books again. That is one of maybe 3-4 books I stopped and never finished in the last 20 years. Man it was awful. Plus, most of his ideas were just plagiarized from Robert Jordan. He did have a couple of unique ideas that were cool though.
The fun thing most of these games aren’t even truly capitalist. City builders like Cities Skylines, Tropico and Anno have little or no free market and you’re just in control of a centralized planned economy.
The only truly capitalist games I saw on that list are X4 and Offworld Trading Company since you play as a single private owner competing with others on the market.
My friends who play PDX games with me and know my politics sometimes tease me about the game using currency or referencing profitability. And then I remind them that we’re all meticulously planning our economies with virtually nothing left for a privileged class to decide. And our decisions, though made in a context of imperialism, aren’t being made for personal wealth but state power.
Except when you’re playing Victoria and the capitalists decide it’s time to build the 34th arts academy with the building capacity it took you sweat and blood to build.
Cities skylines is definitely a capitalist economy as you literally make your earnings by changing tax rate and the only thing you control insofar as unmodded goes is zoning and city services lmao
This just in: America not capitalist. You have exactly as much control as the average American town/city does in that game. Control of zoning and road development isn’t a “planned economy” lmaoo. The entire game is based in and around a capitalistic society and the demand created by said society in your town for it to grow that’s the whole reason for the demand bars.
You also don’t really have to worry about satisfying the demands of huge multinational corporations. So it’s pretty idealized, as though capital has no undue influence on state-level political decisions.
Y’know what, I think I either completely fabricated a memory in my head or more likely got the person confused. I very vividly remember hearing about a prolific wealthy author who got called out for taking credit for a lot of other people’s work but I now can’t find any word about it being RL Stine despite my memory. No idea who I’m remembering.
For those of y’all who don’t know: MatPat has announced that he will be stepping down from The Game Theorists to focus on himself and his family; Tom Scott has gone on indefinite hiatus for similar reasons.
I believe this heralds a new era of the internet, where ‘old’ creators are not as influential as the ‘new’ crop springing up, given the rise of Tiktok and the general direction of social media as a whole.
I don’t think it’s got much to do with new types of content being successful. If anything, those guys have just been doing this for so long that they definitely should take a loooong break, at least.
Tom Scott and Matpat didn’t talk about breaks; they’re closing up shop for good in some way: MatPat has said he’s handing over creative control of the Theorist channels and assuming a more casual admin role to spend more time with his kid. Tom Scott said that he set a limit for 10 years on his main channel; he may come back to it, but it doesn’t seem likely. Others are also quitting, such as Moo from the Vanoss Crew.
Tom didn’t say limit, he said goal. He said that after a break, he will probably upload videos to his main channel from time to time, but that when he does come back it won’t be at his current schedule or with his current format.
This seems like a big change only because YouTube/content creators are such a new phenomenon. Makes sense to change tracks after doing the same thing for a while. Or retire if you get filthy rich. It’s a natural cycle, only this time in a new environment.
Tom Scott has been doing the same thing for 10 years. Hell I can barely do the same job for 2 years without getting bored out of my mind.
I always knew him as the guy that copied reddit and tvtropes forum posts and put them into youtube videos while providing no credit to the original people that came up with them.
Not OP but I’ve never heard of that channel either, surprised that YouTube has never recommended it to me despite watching mostly tech and gaming videos
Well it was good in the beginning. I stopped watching when he started uploading FNAF. Back then YouTube was fun as a young gamer: A+Start, Scykoh, the CrazyRussianHacker, animated Minecraft Music Videos to name a few.
memes
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.