And local colloquialisms as well. I can tell you the secret to a Boston accent is to replace the r after a vowel with an h, and that’ll help you pahk the cah at Hahvahd yahd, but won’t do a damn thing when somebody tells you the food at a restaurant is wicked pissah, but warns you that it’s rainin’ feckin’ hahd out deyah so yeh better off takin’ the T to Southie.

But the fear isn’t so rational. It’s like a fear that the cocktail in your example will replace the original vodka whether they want the cocktail or not, or that the vodka will be so diluted by seltzer that it will functionally cease to exist.

It’s like a fear of gentrification of the country as a whole.

It’s also important to remember that the US is a huge exception in this regard as well. Most other countries are like 90%+ native population, and immigrant populations tend to be sort of isolated from the wider national culture due to things like language barriers, and they often set up little “bastions” of their native culture locally wherever they live. We even see plenty of that in the US as well. While there are many distinctly US cultures across the country that are derived from a variety of backgrounds, there are tons of “enclaves” of European culture that make it blatantly clear where immigrants from certain countries settled. In Boston, the culture of Chinatown is distinctly unique and separate from the wider culture of the city, which largely has ties back to Ireland (and is very proud of it). And both of those are distinctly different from where the Italian immigrants settled, who effectively have their own districts of cultures descended from Italy regardless of where they immigrated to.

Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.

The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.

This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.

PG-13 and rated T for teen, respectively

Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.

The moral of Harry Potter is that the status quo is correct and should never be questioned, and nobody should ever try to change anything.

Harry doesn’t defeat Voldemort or change any of the issues inherent in the bumbling bureaucracy of the wizard world. Voldemort kills himself on a magic technicality, Harry becomes a magic cop and helps to ensure that magic is never used to help the undesirables of society (Muggles), and Hermione is ridiculed for being a girl with blue hair and pronouns who tried to end the chattel slavery system before she “grew up” and became a much more sensible person who realized that the slaves actually want to be oppressed, and it’s for their own good.

You can see Rowling’s morality change practically in real-time as the books go on, from criticizing the system to defending it as she began to benefit from it as her wealth grew. And underneath it all, you can see her discriminatory opinions of people. That was always there. When she wants you to hate a woman, she makes them fat or gives them masculine features. If I have to read the phrase “mannish hands” one more time, I might vomit.

Don’t forget that it’s also effectively a pay cut due to the added expenses and time lost in commuting. They should ask if the company is going to at least pay for the maintenance of the car if they aren’t going to pay for the time spent commuting.

Didn’t it also have something to do with a brand deal? Like the suit got extra funding for the movie by making a deal with Duracell to have their batteries in the movie or something.

Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.

More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.

All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.

One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.

But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.

I didn’t know they added swords to CS2

No horse ahead

Welcome to the hypocritical world of Puritan culture.

Some of the earliest British settlers in the US were so extremist that the Church of England kicked them out after they tried to assassinate the king and replace him with a puppet of their own to force their beliefs on the rest of the country.

It was partly these crazies that started the whole sex and bodies=bad and shameful thing in the US that advertisers still believe in today. And swearing is yet another of those weird things. But sex sells, so it’s okay to imply it as long as it’s selling a product and no other time.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.

Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.

Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.

So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.

But it’s okay, “because it’s just cosmetics.”

Probably exactly where they got the idea from.

That’s the one. He’s got it as a clip on the YouTube channel, and that got served to me by the almighty algorithm.

Except that shit is designed by literal psychologists to prey upon people with poor fiscal responsibility, like people with ADHD, depression, addiction issues, and kids.

It’s like blaming people for smoking cigarettes after they got addicted from secondhand smoking.

That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.

The one and only point that I disagree with you on is your take on mtx. They may not affect you, but everything about them is designed to be psychologically exploitative, and the wealthy whale is largely a myth. The vast majority of money from mtx is made from people with addiction issues and other mental health issues or atypical neurology, like people with depression or ADHD.

Microsoft bought up all those studios and didn’t support them, but that’s business as usual for Microsoft, and the money that they’ll make from mtx like this will more than make up for it. I recently watched a former Blizzard dev who was talking about how a single $15 mount for WoW made more money than StarCraft 2 did.

The big issue I see is that most people largely don’t know about anything beyond the big AAA releases, and as we’ve already established, that’s an exploitative wasteland nowadays. There’s plenty of demand for good games and there always will be, but while the indie scene is the best that’s it’s ever been, the majority of indie companies go under after their first game. It’s still hard out there for them, too. There’s just enough of them popping up and putting out truly great games that they can actually compete with the AAA space.

I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.

The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.